Deconstructing the Buddhist Philosophy of Nothingness

- Ren Girard and Violent Origins of Buddhist Culture Ilkwaen Chung

1. Post-doctoral research fellow at the Institute of Systematic Theology and
interdepartmental research-platform 'World Order - Religion - Violence' at the
University of Innsbruck, Austria (2009-10).
2. Dr. theol from the University of Innsbruck, Austria.
3. Member of the Colloquium on Violence and Religion (COV&R) and the European
Society for Intercultural Theology and Interreligious Studies.
4. My research focuses on the social anthropological approach to Buddhism, Ren Girard's
mimetic theory, the dramatic model for interreligious and intercultural hermeneutics and
cultural encounters and Girard's theory in the context of the postmodernism and
poststructural theory
5. Email: Drtheol.chung@gmail.com
This is a revised and extended version of my book, Paradoxie der weltgestaltenden
Weltentsagung im Buddhismus- Ein Zugang aus der Sicht der mimetischen Theorie Rene
Girards (Beitrge zur mimetischen Theorie 28), LIT Verlag 2010, which has gained
international attention(see http://www.scribd.com/doc/87935525/GirardBuddhismChung
This research is intended for future publication and is not intended for general
distribution without written permission from the author.
2012

Ilkwaen Chung

Introduction:
Postmodernism, Poststructuralism and Buddhism

I.
1.
1.1.
1.2.
1.3.
1.4.

Mimetic Desire and Two Buddhisms

Desireless World-renouncer and Householders Desires
Mimetic Theory as Fundamental Theory of Culture
Buddhism as Thought of the World-Renouncer
Derrida, Heidegger and Yogic Philosophy
Nothingness as World-renouncers Dharma
1

1.5.
1.6.

Buddhism as World-renouncers Pure Soteriology

World-renouncers Negativism

2.
2.1.
2.2.

Founding Paradox of Buddhist World Civilization

Civilizational Dynamics of a World-Negating Buddhism
nyat, Diffrance and Indiffrenciation Violente

3.
3.1.
3.2.
3.3.
3.4.

Girard and Buddhism

World-renouncers Renoncement Nirvanesque Total
World-Renouncer as a Living Dead
Christ and Polytheistic Plurality of Buddhas
Sacrificial Violence is Nonviolence (ahis )

4.
4.1.
4.2.
4.3.
4.4.
4.5.
4.6.

Forest World Renunciation

Buddhas as Forest World-renouncers
Village (grma ) and Jungle (araya )
Nirva-Buddhism of Meditation and of Desire-Extinction
Buddhism of Laity and of Kings and its Desires
Sacrificial Mechanism of Merit Transfer
Magical Powers from Meditation

5.
5.1.
5.2.
5.3.
5.4.

Mimesis, Difference, Dharma and Karma

Karma and Channeling of Mimetic Desire
World-Renunciation as Undifferentiation of Caste Difference
Sacrificial Reading of Karmic Retribution
Karmic Retribution and Magical Causality

II.

World-Renunciation as Anti-structure and Reservoir of Creativity

1.
1.1.
1.2.
1.3.
1.4.

World-Renunciation as Contained Chaos and Reservoir of Creativity

World-Renunciation as Safety Valve
Representive of Reversal of Values during Festivals
World-Renouncer as a Field of Merit
World-Renouncer and Dionysiac Undifferentiation

2.
2.1.
2.2.
2.3.
2.4.
3.
3.1.

World Renouncer, World Conqueror and the Founding Victim

Mechanism between World-Renunciation and World Order
Negativistic Dharma of World-renouncer
Ritual and Civil Death of the World-Renouncer
Negativistic Philosophy of Buddhism
Modern World as Mimetic Crisis
Mimetic Passions and Sacrificial Reality
2

3.2.

Mimetic Crisis and Intensification of Amulet cults

4.
4.1.
4.2.
4.3.
4.4.

Violence and Reciprocity

Violence and Reciprocity in Girards theory
Gift and Sacrificial Gift in Gastropolitics and -semantics
Cross and Begging Bowl Similarities and Differences
Buddhas Violent Death and Founding Murder

5.
5.1.
5.2.
5.3.
5.4.
5.5.

Positive Mimesis and Problem of Imitation

Transgression of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas
Undifferentiating Crime of the Victim
Christ, Bodhisattvas and the Founding Victim
Becoming Buddhas and Imitatio Christi
Explanatory Potential of Social Anthropological Approach

6.
6.1.
6.2.
6.3.

Intercultural Mimesis
Intercultural Mimesis and Buddhist Studies
Orientalism and Protestant Buddhism
Decontextualization of World-renouncers Meditation

7.
7.1.
7. 2.
7.3.
7.4.
7.5.
7.6.
7.7.

Specialists of the Sacred and Violent Undifferentiation

World-renouncer as Specialists of the Sacred
Yogic Process as Process of Violent Undifferentiation
La Pense Sauvage, Buddhism and Lvi-Strauss
Undifferentiating Crimes of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas
Passions are Awakening: a Mimetic Reading
Ascetics and Courtesans: Violent Undifferentiation
Dionysian Logic of Tragic World-Renouncer

III.

World Renunciation and World Order

1.
1.1.
1.2.
1.3.

Mimetic Crisis and Interiorization of Sacrifice

Buddha is Burning: Interiorization of Sacrificial Fire
Interiorization of Sacrifice: Achievements and Failures
A Living Lamp: Buddhist Self-immolation through Fire

2.
3.
3.1.
3.2.
3.3.

Nonduality as Violent Undifferentiation

Buddhism, Nietzsche, Heidegger and C.G. Jung
Longing for Violent Sacred
Buddhist Superman Beyond Good and Evil
Violent Sacred, Heidegger, Eliade, Evola and Fascism
3

3.4.

A Crime of Undifferentiation

4.
4.1.
4.2.
4.3.
4.4.

World-renouncers Logic of Nonduality as Undifferentiation

Meditative Process of Violent Undifferentiation
Twinness (sahaja) and Undifferentiation
Monstrous Double and Demonical Buddhas
Monstrous Buddha Couples and Logic of Nonduality

5.
Verbal Contest, Stichomythia and Kan
5. 1. Play of Differentiation and Undifferentiation
5.2.
Kan, Stichomythia and Simulation of Mimetic Crisis
5.3.
Sacrificial dimension of the Buddhist Initiation
5.4.
World-Renouncer in a State of Prolonged Initiation
5.5.
Kan : Poison against Poison
5.6.
Fox/ Bodhisattva/ Scapegoat in the Wild Fox Kan
5.7.
Buddhist Logic of Radical Elimination
6.
6.1.
6.2.
6.3.
6.4.
6.5.
6.6.
6.7.
6.8.
6.9.

World-Renouncer as Slayer of Distinctions

iva, Dionysos and the Victim
iva (the great yogin) as the Founding Victim
World-Renouncers Yogic Meditation on Death
World-Renouncer as Sin-Eater
World-Renouncer Undifferentiates World Order
Sacrificial Mechanism of Merit Transfer
Meditation and Anticipation of Death
Tapas as Expiation
Forest World-Renouncer and its Domestication

7.
7.1.
7.2.
7.3.
7.4.
7.5.
7.6.
7. 7.
7.8.

Dialectic between World-Renunciation and World Order

Buddha Bad Karma
Bodhidharma as Founding Victim
Bodhidharma as a Red-beared Barbarian
Meditation as a Form of Trance
War of Relics
Self-mummified Buddhas
Yogic Process as a Death Process
World Conqueror, World Renouncer and the Victim

IV.

World-Renouncer and Logic of the Sacred

1.
1.1.

World-Renouncers Dionysian Logic of the Sacred

Heidegger, Kyoto School and Zen-nationalism
4

1.2.
1.3.
1.4.

Buddhology in the Age of Fascism

Crisis of Modernity, Logic of Place and Carl Schmitt
Samdhi as World-renouncers Grave

2.
2.1.
2.2.
2.3.
2.4.
2.5.
2.7.
2.8.
2.9.
2.10.

Mythology and Facism in Japan and Germany

Nishidas Logic of Place and Schmitts Nomos der Erde
Philosophy of Nothingness as World Philosophy
Mimetic Crisis of Modernity and Kyoto School
Absolute Nothingness as a Field of Absolute Affirmation
Logic of Soku-hi and Violent Undifferentiation
World-renouncers Foundig Role for the World Order
Heraclitean Logos of Nothingness
World-Renouncers Rude Awakenings and Violent Sacred
Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Hunger for the Mythological

3.

Kenotic God and Differentiating nyat and the Victim

3.1.
3.2.
3.3.
3.4.
3.5.

Kenotic God and Sacrificial nyat

Violent Paradox of Dynamic nyat
Kenosis, Weak Thought and Strong Sacrificial nyat
Logic of Species and Immanent Transcendence
World-Renunciation as Contained Chaos for the World Order

V.

Deconstructing the Philosophy of Nothingness

1.
1.1.
1.2.
1.3.
1.4.

Post-structuralism, Buddhism and Girard

Derrida, Girard and Paradoxes of the Buddhist Sacred
Formalistic Expulsion of Anthropological Content
The Undifferentiated and Forest World-Renouncer
Pharmakon, Scapegoat and N Theater

2.
2.1.
2.2.
2.3.

Process Philosophy and Sacrificial Emptiness

Process Philosophy and Sacrificial Emptiness
Nothingness has No Physical Meaning
Process Philosophy and Yogic Process of Buddhas

3.
3.1.
3.2.
3.3.
3.4.

Psychology of World-Renouncer and Western Buddhism

Nietzsche, Sloterdijk and Neo-Dionysian Philosophy
iek : New Age Pagan Universe and Western Buddhism
Dionysius,the Crucified and Buddhas
Buddhas Dangerous Gaze

VI.

A Dramatic Model for the Inter-religious Hermeneutics

1.
1.1.
1.2.
2.

Mimesis, Complexity and Vanity of our conflicts

A Dramatic Model for the Inter-religious Hermeneutics
Mimetic Theory as a Theory of Conflict
Mimesis, Orientalism and Postcolonial Cultural Studies

Deconstructing the Buddhist Philosophy of Nothingness

- Ren Girard and Violent Origins of Buddhist Culture Ilkwaen Chung

Introduction:
Postmodernism, Poststructuralism and Buddhism
This book is a revised and extended version of my book, Paradoxie der weltgestaltenden
Weltentsagung im Buddhismus- Ein Zugang aus der Sicht der mimetischen Theorie Rene
Girards (Beitrge zur mimetischen Theorie 28), LIT Verlag 2010, which has gained
international

attention.

Exploring

conversation

between Buddhism and

contemporary

postmodern discourse, I shall attempt the further deepening of the social anthropological
Buddhist studies in the light of Girards mimetic hermeneutics.
(Western) Buddhism has been Modetrend of the intellectual elite of Europe who see
Buddhism in its various forms as the only religion that is truly peaceful. Even in Germany,
despite still existing idealizing tendencies of Buddhism (Verklrungstendenzen), the
"romantic understanding of Buddhism" was increasingly called into question in recent
decades.

Post-structuralists were theorists who tried to understand Western Buddhists. If the initial
take-up of Tibetan Buddhism in the West was associated with the outburst of experimentation
with consciousness, lifestyle and community that took place in the late 1960s, then scholars
such as Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari, Michel Foucault or Julia Kristeva gained much of
their appeal from their ability to make sense of precisely that historical moment. Deleuze and
Guattaris sympathy with Eastern modes of thought is evident in their joint works, and the
deconstruction of the Freudian self that they present in Anti-Oedipus is also an explicit
deconstruction of the illusions that maintain the Western mode of being.2
Attempts have been made to reinterpret Buddhist emptiness through the postmodern
philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. But, as Olson argues, the emptiness discussed here posseses
little resemblance to the Buddhist understanding of emptiness. There is a tendency in these
kinds of writings to make some postmodernists more akin to the spirit of (Zen) Buddhism than
they really are in fact. It is also argued that Ngrjunas middle path follows the Derridean trace
and Ngrjuna notion of emptiness (nyat) is the equivalent of Derridas diffrance, and
represents the absolute negation which both constitutes and deconstitutes the directional trace.
But many postmodern thinkers, it has been argued, move in the direction of Zen Buddhism, but
they do not make the final leap or transition to the Zen philosophical position or something
akin to it.3 We will read this Buddhist world-renouncers absolute negation, absolute emptiness
and final leap into yogic nothingness sacrificially through the perspective of more radical
Girardian deconstruction of violent origins of human culture including Buddhist culture.
Contemporary thought, Girard claims, unfortunately has little interest in truly scientific
questions. Critical and theoretical thought in France pursues the paradoxes of mimetic play on
the level of the text with an extraordinary finesse, a dazzling virtuosity. But for him, this is
precisely where it encounters its limits. Too often French critics, Girard argues, become
intoxicated with their own verbal acrobatics, while the truly interesting questions go unasked
or are even scorned in the name of purely metaphysical principles. There are better things to do
at this point than endlessly amuse ourselves with paradoxes.4
In this book, instead of postmodern verbal acrobatics of the Buddhist discourses of
nothingness, I attempt to ask this truly interesting questions about the violent paradoxes
surrounding the sacred Buddhist world-renouncer in his desireless homlessness. Nothingness
and emptiness in Buddhism turns out to be sacrificial rather than deconstructive. The strong
1

Karnina Kollmar-Paulenz and Inken Prohl, Einfhrung: Buddhismus und Gewalt, In Zeitschrift fr
Religionswissenschaft 11 (2003): 143-147.
2
Geoffrey Samuel, Tantric Revisionings. New Understandings of Tibetan Buddhism and Indian Religion (Delhi:
Motilal Banarsidass, 2005), 335.
3
Carl Olson, Zen and the Art of Postmodern Philosophy: Two Paths of Liberation from the Representational Mode of
Thinking (New York: State University of New York Press, 2000), 20-2.
4
Ren Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World: Research undertaken in collaboration with Ren
Girard and G. Lefort (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 17-8.

sacrificial dimension of Buddhist seemingly deconstructive nothingness can be viewed from the
viewpoint of the mystified sacrificial mechanism of founding victim. The collective logic and
social anthropological logic hidden behind or around homeless world-renouncer in his imposed
renunciation (auferlegte Verzicht )5 must be deconstructed. Following Girard who wants to
bring overphilosophical interpretations down to earth,6 I shall reread these overphilosophical
interpretations of Buddhist world-renouncers nothingness against a Indian Monsoon Asia
(Paul Mus) bakground.
In Buddhist texts, the founding victim (sacred world-renouncer) seems to remain hidden
from the view. A radical (social-) anthropological re-reading of Buddhism, its logic and
philosophy through the perspective of mimetic theory is necessary in order truly to deconstruct
any Bududdhist metaphysics of nothingness. The deconstruction of Buddhist, or more
exactly world-renouncers sacrificial nothingnenss transfigured by representations of the
Buddhist sacred brings to light the founding mechanism of Buddhist culture. The surviving,
vestigial forms of violent sacred represented and specialized by Buddhist forest worldrenouncer will be observed, discerned and traced. The polysemousness and polyvalence of
violently sacred Buddhist nothingness can be traced back to the the cultural mechanism around
the sacred, ambivalent and liminal forest world-renouncer as the founding and differentiating
victim. The sacrificial resolution, Girard argues, is the sole matrix of all institutions, so
polyvalent that it is therefore impossible to reproduce as such and concrete rituals will always
accentuate one synchronic moment at the expense of others.7
Based on the sacrificial rereading of Buddhist world-renunciatory nothingness, I will
elaborate on the dialectic between world-renunciation (undifferentiation) and world order
(differentiation) in the light of Girardian deconstruction of the violent sacred and of the whole
range of cultural texts. Violent paradox of founding, differentiating and world-constructing
Buddhist world-renunciation and world-renouncer will be explained in the light of the theoy of
human culture that Girard has elaborated. This mimetic reading of Buddhist world-renunciation
will give us fresh readings of civilizational paradox of Buddhist culture based on sacred and
sacralizing nothingness.
As will be shown later, Buddhist emptiness means world-renouncers emptiness:
Bodhisattva is empty. Buddhist nonduality represents world-renouncers yogic logic and
knowledge. In the Perfection of Wisdom (Prajpramit ) stras, the Bodhisattvas so-called
nondual knowledge is described in the paradoxical word-play that has become the
trademark of Buddhism in much of Western popular literature on the subject. The Bodhisattva,
when practicing the Perfection of Wisdom does not perceive the existence of a Bodhisattva.
5

Joachim F. Sprockhoff, Sanysa. Quellenstudien zur Askese im Hinduismus. Bd. I: Untersuchungen ber die
Sanysa-Upaniads ( Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1976), 289.
6
Ren Girard, The Scapegoat, translated by Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1986), 32.
7
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 57.

Why is this ? Bodhisattva is empty.8 Buddhist emptiness represents yogic-sacrificial logic

of world-renouncing Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. Many modern and postmodern discourse on
Buddhism seem to lack the social anthropological point of view. The primary new
misunderstanding of Buddhism, it seems to me, lies in the forgotteness of social anthropological
roots of Buddhist world-renouncers value, dharma and logics. Thus, Buddhist anti-logics
should be understood from the viewpoint of the anti-structural logic of world-renunciation. We
will read this Buddhas world-renouncing and body-renouncing logic of nothingness and
Dionysian logic of nondualiy from the viewpoint of Girardian understanding of the the logic of
the violence and the sacred.9
What needs to be deconstructed is the mystified sacrificial mechanism around the
ambivalent and liminal forest Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. I attempt to decode this Buddhist logic
of sacrificial nothingness and Dionysian nonduality represented by forest Buddhas and
Bodhisattvas in the light of Girards explanation of the logic of the violence and the sacred.
It has been argued that if postmodernism philosophy is a search for new paradigms, Zen
philosophy undermines all past, present, and future paradigms. Lacans gaze, the erotic eye of
Bataille, Foucaults gaze that objetifies and controls, and Derridas ambiguous eyes are all
different than the understanding of the eye offered by Dgen and Nishitani because they, it was
aruged, are dualistic conceptions. Perception is said to be connected in western thought with a
representational mode of thinking. It is this mode of thinking from which many
postmodernists are attempting to free themselves as they attempt to find new paradigms that
bare some resemblance to the nonrepresentational mode of thinking of Zen Buddhism,
although in the final analysis it is not the same as the Zen way of thinking. There is, it was
argued, this fundamental difference between postmodernism and Buddhism.

10

This so-called nonrepresentational mode of thinking of (Zen) Buddhism could be thought of

as the sacrificial and world-negating thought and dharma of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. The
originally world-renouncers nonrepresentational mode of thinking, the forest and worldrenouncing mode of thinking undermines all paradigms. This Buddhist nonrepresentational and
negativistic logic turns out to be sacrificial in a ritual sense rather than deconstructive in the
postmodern sense. The negativistic philosophy of Buddhism11 should be understood social
anthropologically. In this book, this negativistic mode of thinking will be considered in terms of
social anthropologically very specific world-renouncers life-negating dharma and logic. There
is fundamental difference between the so-called commonsense dualistic postmodernism
philosophy belonging to the global village and Buddhist, more exactly forest world-renouncers
8

Luis O. Gmez, From the Extraordinary to the Ordinary: Images of the Bodhisattva in East Asia, in The Christ
and the Bodhisattva, ed. Donald S. Lopez, Jr and Steven C. Rockefeller (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1987), 156.
9
Ren Girard, Job: The Victim of His People (London: Athlone Press, 1987), 166.
10
Olson, Zen and the Art of Postmodern Philosophy, xii, 7-8.
11
Moritz Winternitz, Geschichte der Indischen Literatur. Band 3. Stuttgart, 1968, 431.

violently undifferentiating philosophy. The more dramatic model for the comparative
philosophy and cross-cultural dialog needs to be attempted.
Thus Buddhist philosophy should not be confused with French deconstruction. In the
Buddhist texts, world-renouncers meditative emptiness (world-renouncers meditation on
emptiness) is treated as a necessary condition of possibility for emancipation. It is a mark of an
enlightened being (bodhisattva) in contradistinction to an ordinary sentient being (sattva).
Derrida, as Wang rightly points out, might be skeptical of the very notion of enlightenment from
the outset, and it is very unlikely he has a soteriology. He was initially interested in literary
ideality. His early semiotics endeavours were concerned with the construction of an aesthetics of
Writing.12 This seemingly deconstructive Buddhist emptiness is concerned with the worldnegating soteriology of self-emptying and empty Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. The very
structuring mechanism of reconcilatory victim around these self-deconstructing or selfdestructing world-renouncer (Buddas and Bodhisattvas) should be deconstructed.
Buddhist so-called nonrepresentational thinking may be considered as representing the
world-negating and sacrificial logic of world-renouncer who belongs to the chaotic and
undifferentiated forest. The mimetic hypothesis accounts for the ambiguity of the sacred in
ritual and in language (Derrida), but also for its partial demythologization in Sophocles.
Girards Violence and the Sacred first encountered an anti-referential prejudice that prohibited
any belief that myth (or, more generally, religion) could refer to anything outside itself, and a
pseudo-scientific skepticism that knew all truth claims are now obsolete. Girards reading of
mythology and primitive religion scandalizes contemporary notions of textuality.13 Thus the
nonrepresentational and ambiguous Buddhist logic and philosophy needs to be comprehended in
reference to the ambiguity of the Buddhist sacred represented by the liminal forest Buddhas and
Bodhisattvas.
Buddhist emptiness represents the world-renouncing logic and dharma of homeless and
desireless Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. Nothingness and Emptiness was the world-renouncers
logic of life-negation. Emptiness became one of the most fundamental dogmas of the Mahyna.
It is this concept which is expounded at great length in the remarkable class of Mahyna
literature called the Perfection of Wisdom, Prajpramit. As a whole, this literature
professes to reveal to its students the nature of the gnostic wisdom of the Bodhisattva. The
fact of the emptiness of all phenomena is here simply stated without any attempt at motivation.
The same formulas of negation are applied to all elements of the pseudo-personality, the four
great elements, the six sensory faculties together with their objects etc., No concept, no
clinging to something, no name is left standing; when the last barrier, that of attachment to
the idea of Emptiness itself, is broken, the yogi merges into the amorphous. True Nature of
12

Youxuan Wang, Buddhism and Deconstruction: Towards a Comparative Semiotics (London: Curzon/Routledge,
2001), 16.
13
Joseph P. Natoli, Literary Theorys Future(s) (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989), 126-7.

10

all Elements which is empty. The earlier works of the Prajpramit literature form an
amorphous and ever-expanding mass of formulas repeated ad nauseam, an endless litany of
negation. The Bodhisattva, when practising the Perfection of Wisdom, does not perceive the
existence of a Bodhisattva. He does not perceive (any) appellation, nor does he perceive the
Perfection of Wisdom. None of these he perceive, and he neither perceives nor practises (them):
why is this ? Bodhisattva is empty. The term emptiness refers to the mind of the Sage
which is non-being in so far that it is free from all conscious thought, desire and
attachment.14

The Buddhist term emptiness refers to the mind and logic of the world-negating

and body-renouncing Buddhas and Bodhisattvas which are non-being . Buddhist emptiness
turns out to be a sacrificial self-destruction of world-renouncing Buddhas and Bodhisattvas.
Buddhist teaching of no-self represents the specific psychoanalysis of egoless worldrenouncer rather than general and universal psychoanalysis of normal people. What
psychoanalysis shares with Buddhism is, for iek, the emphasis that there is no Self as
substantive agent of psychic life. iek cites Mark Epstein who, in his book on Buddhism and
psychoanalysis, refers positively to Lacans early crit on the mirror stage, with its notion of
the Ego as an object, the result of the subjects identification with an idealized fixed image of
itself: the Self is a fetishized illusion of a substantial core of subjectivity where, effectively,
there is nothing. This is why, for Buddhism, iek rightly argues, the point is not to discover
ones true Self, but to accept that there is none, that the Self as such is an illusion, an
imposture. Self is a disruptive, false and, as such, unnecessary metaphor for the process of
awareness and knowing. The impossibility of figuring out who or what we are, for iek, is
inherent in Buddhism, since there is nothing that we really are just a void in the core of our
being.

15

From the viewpoint of world-renouncers dharma and logic, Buddhist emptiness and
nothingness should be reconsidered and reread. A Buddhist sutra says: when a Bodhisattva, a
great being, practises the perfection of wisdom, he does not see a Bodhisattva as real. A
Bodhisattva is empty of being an inherently existent Bodhisattva.16 A bodhisattva is empty
or void (shunya).17 Later we will deal with the ritual and civil death of world-renouncer.
World-renouncing Bodhisattva in his state of liminal homelessness and egolessness is
ontologically empty: (world-renouncer Bodhisattvas) skillful lying is a good illustration of
skillful means. Since all words are false (in the sense that there are no real entities to
designate), truthfulness is literally impossible, and so lying is not seen as a major transgression.
Language, even if it is only a convenient fiction, helps us maneuver around in particular, it
14

Erik Zrcher, The Buddhist Conquest of China: The Spread and Adaptation of Buddhism in Early Medeival China,
(Leiden: Brill, 2007), 100-2.
15
"Author's Afterward: Why Hegel is a Lacanian," in Interrogating the Real, ed. Slavoj iek, Rex Butler, and Scott
Stephens (London/ New York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2006), 335.
16
Jeffrey Hopkins and L. Rimpoche, The Buddhism of Tibet (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass Publications, 1987), 71-2.
17
Wolf-Dieter Storl, Shiva, the Wild God of Power and Ecstasy (Vermont: Inner Traditions 2004), 238-9.

11

helps ontologically empty Bodhisattvas lead empty persons toward an equally empty
nirvana.18
According to social anthropological re-reading of Buddhist (world-renouncers) emptiness,
the allegedly deconstructive Buddhist nothingness and emptiness turns out to be a sacrificial
concept imposed on ontologically empty Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. The yogic dimension of
Buddhist seemingly deconstructive devoidness and nonduality should be taken into
consideration. The very nature of the Zen masters approach undermines any idea of answering
his questions in an ordinary manner. It simply does not make sense within ordinary
structures of thought and our ordinary, commonsense ontological and epistemological
constructions of identity and certainty. In Zen practice these constructions of self and identity
were seen as a structure that the spiritual aspirant needs to deconstruct in order to realize and
actualize spiritual awakening.

From a Girardian viewpoint, this allgedly deconstruction

could be re-read in the sense of Buddhist world-renouncers destruction and ritual

undifferentiation of differential constructions of self and identity in his initiatory path. Buddhist
teaching of world-renouncing emptiness and transgressive nonduality simply does not make
sense within ordinary and worldly structures of thought and our ordinary, commonsense
ontological and epistemological constructions of identity and certainty. Buddhist worldrenouncer deconstructs and destructures the worldly and ordinary constructions of self and
identity. In Girardian thinking, forest Buddhas and Bodhisattvas undifferentiate the worldly
differentiation. World-renouncing Buddhas as the structuring and reconciliatory victims
transgress the differentiated cultural system. Traditional Vedntic sdhana is said to proceed by
affirmation and negation: the practitioner either takes the (world-renouncing and life-negating)
via negativa, as in the great Upaniadic negative injunction, neti, neti (not this, not this), to
negate any and all identifications with the bodily form, thereby constantly disidentifying with
his body and by extention all misidentifications with name and form (nma rpa). As we
shall see later, world-renouncer takes the world-renouncing via negativa. In his negative or
negativistic dharma of anti-structural world-renunciation with its negative injunction, worldrenouncer negates all identifications with the bodily form, thereby constantly disidentify with
his body. The teacher was said to employ a deconstructive move in the negative, often with a
series of paradoxical questions to shift questioners out of the dualistic structures of thought. In
other deconstructive moves, the questioner will be plunged into a series of seemingly
paradoxical or self-contradictory questions and declarations that directly challenge his or her
dualistic experience of self and world. Advaita was said to attempt to overcome the finite,
dualistic signification of words and experientially realize the undifferentiated absolute.

19

By undifferentiating the commonsense dualistic and differential systems, forest and sacred
18

Richard H. Jones, Mysticism and Morality: A New Look at Old Questions (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2004), 211,
footnote 34.
19
Leesa S. Davis, Advaita Vednta and Zen Buddhism: Deconstructive Modes of Spiritual Inquiry (London/New
York: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2010), 13, 19, 20,38.

12

world-renouncer could be understood to attempt to represent the violently undifferentiated

sacred. Buddhist paradoxical dialectic of civilizing and structuring anti-structural worldrenunciation could be well illuminated by Girards insights into the dynamic of the crisis. At the
very moment when all differences are imperiled, a paradoxical reversal occurs: by virtue of
being concentrated in a single individual (founding victim), undifferentiation itself is transmuted
into the basis for a new difference. 20 This civilizational dynamic of the crisis explains the
Buddhist dynamic of nothingness. By virtue of the differentiating mechanism of the
reconcilatory victim, undifferentiation itself (represented by the forest world-renunciation and
its representatives, Buddhas) is transmuted into the basis and place for a new difference. The
anthropological reading of Buddhist world-renouncing nothingness from the viewpoint of
Girards cultural theory seek to understand this paradoxical reversal of the Buddhist Great
Death into the Great Affirmation.
Buddhist

allegedly

deconstructive

emptiness

and

nonduality

can

be properly

comprehended wenn read aginst the backdrop of yogic initiatory process of ritual
undifferentiation and of world-negating dharma of homeless and desireless world-renouncer
rather than against the backdrop of contemporary postmodernism and poststructural theory.
According to Conze, the metaphysics of the Mahyna expresses a state of intoxication
with the Unconditioned, and at the same time attempts to cope with it, to sober it down.21
Buddhist world-renouncers metaphysics of nondualtiy and emptiness expresses a yogic
initiatory state of Dionysian and festive intoxication with the violent sacred.
It is worthwhile in Buddhist studies to attempt to reconstruct the original context of worldrenunciation in which particular doctrines were formulated. We must put the seemingly
deconstructive or formal logical Buddhist nothingness, emptiness and nothingness back into the
originally context of the forest world-renunciation and of the ambivalent and liminal existence
of body-renouncing world-renouncer. It also should be noted that there is the yogic initiatory
dimension in Buddhist (world-renouncers) philosophy and logic. The Tantric texts insist on the
secret character of their contents, and are not to be made known to unbelievers or even to
believers who are uninitiated into the innermost circles of the adept. In the West, on the other
hand, the pride of philosophy, as Zimmer puts it, is that it is open to the understanding and
criticism of all. Western thought is exoteric, and that is regarded as one of the signs and
proofs of its universal validity. Western philosophy has no secret doctrine, but challenges all
to scrutinize her arguments, demanding no more than intelligence and an open-minded fairness
in discussion.22 A social anthropological close reading of ontologically empty Buddhist worldrenouncers sacrificial emptiness and a proper understanding of yogic initiatory context of
20

Ren Girard, Oedipus Unbound: Selected Writings on Rivalry and Desire, ed. Mark R. Anspach (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2004), xiii.
21
Edward Conze, Buddhist Thought in India: Three Phases of Buddhist Philosophy (London: Allen & Unwin, 1983),
202.
22
Heinrich Zimmer, Philosophies of India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 62-3.

13

Buddhist concepts allow us to see its strong sacrificial nature.

The present book explores the capability of mimetic theory to throw new light on
civilizational paradox of world-constructing Buddhist world-renunciation. To describe the
mutual dependencies of mimesis, difference, violence and religion in the genesis and
preservation of Buddhist culture, this cultural theoretical reading of Buddhism from the
standpoint of mimetic theory is divided under the three pillars of the mimetic theory (1 mimetic
desire; 2 mimetic mechanism of reconciliation as a origin of culture and 3 Christianity and the
paradoxical unity of all religion).
Based on Dumont's social anthropological understanding of the paradox of worldrenunciation as anti-structure and reservoir of creativity, paradoxical dialectic between world
order (differentiation) and world-renunciation (undifferentiation) will be illuminated through the
perspective of the paradoxical order generated by the structuring and differentiating mechanism
of mimetic reconciliation. The mimetic theory with its simplicity of the hypothesis and its rich
possibility of applications has a great descriptive and explanatory power regarding the violent
paradox of Buddhist world civilizations based on world-renouncing orientations. For Girard, all
religious rituals spring from the surrogate victim, and all the great institutions of mankind, both
secular and religious, spring from ritual. Such is the case with political power, legal institutions,
medicine, the theater, philosophy and anthropology itself. For the working basis of human
thought, the process of symbolization, is rooted in the surrogate victim. All mans religious,
familial, economic, and social institutions grew out of the body of an original victim. The
surrogate victim, as founder of the rite, appears as the ideal educator of humanity, in the
etymological sense of e-ducatio.23
Inspired by the sacrificial interpretation of world-renunciation24 and by means of Girard's
interpretation of the myths, I use a genetic approach for the understanding the mythic sources of
the world-renunciation. The genesis of Buddhism has to be understood in the cultural historical
context of India (ramaa movement). 25 Sometimes the genetic context of Buddhism is
neglected. 26 In place of the nihilistic and pessimistic misunderstanding of the worldrenunciation and of Buddhist nothingness, I will elucidate paradoxical dynamics of creative
world-renunciation. Despite my interest in genetic comprehension of mainly original and
mythological origins of Buddhist world-renunciation, Buddhist potential for peace is by no
means to be overlooked. In this work, it's not about to deny existing potential for peaceful action
and an ethic of compassion and mindfulness in the Buddhist teachings and the social practice. In
23

Ren Girard, Violence and the Sacred, translated by Patrick Gregory (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1977), 306.
24
Charles Malamoud, Cooking the World: Ritual and Thought in Ancient India, trans. David White (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1996).
25
Johannes Bronkhorst, Zur Genese des Buddhismus in seinem geschichtlichen Kontext. Proprium Abgrenzung
gegenber hinduistischen Traditionen und Jinismus, in Der Buddhismus als Anfrage an christliche Theologie und
Philosophie (Studien zur Religionstheologie Band 5) (Mdling: St. Gabriel 2000), 226, 243-6.
26
Ibid., 243.

14

particular, we can acknolwedge the positive potential of Buddhist ethics and wisdom of cool
renunciation, detachment and disinterestedness in the hot and indifferentiated age of mimetic
crisis. The gradual erosion of every dharma, of every rigid social hierarchy and division
based on sacral norms, has plunged the modern individual into mimetic social flux, deep into
ever more extreme oscillations of desire and resentment mobilized by the increasing
democratization of societies.27
Mimetic theory does not downplay the possibility of radical awareness of the violent nature
of humanity in the Indian traditions of world-renunciation. Despite their inherent "structural
violence," 28 Girard himself has recognized the positive potential derived from worldrenouncing doctrines (such as Jainism) against anger, resentment, envy and violence . Mimetic
theory does not exclude the possibility that a given society or religious group could reach a form
of radical awareness of the violent nature of human beings. Girard fully acknowledge that all
these religions are fully aware, from a normative standpoint, of the injustice of violence and that
the Easter traditions have contributed in making those societies less violent. They know that the
human being should withdraw from anger, resentment, envy, violence. According to Girard,
Easter traditions, however, are not fully aware of the scapegoat mechanism.29
Building on Girard's mimetic reading of the Indian mythology and the Brahmaas30 and on
Heestermans assumption regarding the interiorization of sacrifice31, a mimetic reading of the
paradoxical dialectic between world order and world-renunciation will be sought. It sees itself
as a hypothetical reading in dramatic dialogue with other approaches (eg, phenomenologicalexistential philosophical approach or meditation-buddhism approaches, etc.). The similarities
and differences between the traditions of renunciation among world religions will be clarified
within the framework of the "universal from an anthropological point of view"32 and of the "last
symbolic unity of the victim," which summarizes the entire religious history of mankind.33
27

Pierpaolo Antonello and Joo Cezar de Castro Rocha, Introduction: One long argument from the beginning to
the end, in Ren Girard, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture (London: Continuum,
2008), 13.
28
However, in Jainism there is a system of extensive worshipping of all sorts of deities, which present residual
sacrificial elements. Although non-violent in nature, Jainism has eventually relapsed into a patriarchal caste system
of Hindu Brahmanical heritage which is so widespread in India and which still represents a form of exclusion, of
symbolic and actual outcasting. This is structural violence, i.e. radical injustice. Moreover, as was suggested at a
recent COV & R meeting, the history of religions and societies in Asia testifies, from a descriptive standpoint, that
Hindu and Buddhist cultures and states have not been without violence, as is commonly believed, pretty much in the
same way as has happened with historical Christianity (Pierpaolo Antonello und Joo Cezar de Castro Rocha, in
Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 213.
29
Ibid., 212-4.
30
Ren Girard, Le sacrifice (Paris: Bibliothque nationale de France, 2003).
31
Jan C. Heesterman, Die Interiorisierung des Opfers und der Aufstieg des Selbst (atman), in Der Hinduismus als
Anfrage an christliche Theologie und Philosophie, ed. Andreas Bsteh (Mdling: St Gabriel 1997), 289-327.
32
Louis Dumont, Individualismus: Zur Ideologie der Moderne, translated by U. Pfau und A. Russer (Frankfurt am
Main: Campus Verlag, 1991), 192.
33
Ren Girard, Wenn all das beginnt. Ein Gesprch mit Michel Treguer. Aus dem Franzsischen von Pascale
Veldboer (Beitrge zur mimetischen Theorie 5) ( Mnster: Thaur 1997), 161.

15

III.

Mimetic Desire and Two Buddhisms

1. Desireless World-renouncer and Householders Desires

1.1. Mimetic Theory as Fundamental Theory of Culture
Mimetic theory has the characteristics of a great theory and is one of the great attempts of a
universal theory of religion, centered on a hypothesis about the genesis and the origin of the
sacrifice. The increasing importance of the mimetic theory arises from the fact that it makes
easier to understand violent conflicts in our society than other approaches. It is essentially a
theory of conflict, which represents "paradoxical unity of all religion" as a comprehensive
theory of the culture throughout human history and rejects the demonization of the archaic
religions. Girard emphasizes the basic orientation of all religion toward peace. Mimetic theory
helps us to understand mankinds radical incapacity to understand its own violence and our
inability to recognize the founding violence and the primordial role that the misunderstanding of
this violence has played throughout human history. The divine employment of the scapegoat
mechanism (die gttliche Indienstnahme des Sndenbockmechanismus) sealed the unity of
human religiosity," writes Girard.34 He interprets the high religions as laborious attempts of the
exodus from the world under deceptive mechanisms of violence. But there were also many
relapses and partially "subtle mechanisms of projection and violence."35
The quintessential scandal is the fact that the founding victim has finally been revealed as
such and that Christ has a role to play in this revelation. Later religions, Girard argues,
diminish, minimize, soften, and even totally eliminate sacred guilt as well as any traces of
violence; but these are minor dissimulations and bear no relation to the system of representing
persecution. This system, for Girard, collapses in the world of the christian Gospels. There is no
longer any question of softening or sublimation. Rather, a return to truth is made possible by a
process which, in our lack of understanding, we consider primitive simply because it reproduces
the violent origin once more, this time in order to reveal it and thus make it inoperative.
According to Girard, the Passion of Christ reveals the scapegoat mechanism, i.e., that which
should remain invisible if these forces are to maintain themselves. By revealing that mechanism
34

Ren Girard, Tatsachen, nicht nur Interpretationen, in Das Opfer aktuelle Kontroversen. Religions-politischer
Diskurs im Kontext der mimetischen Theorie, ed. Bernhard Dieckmann (Beitrge zur mimetischen Theorie 12)
(Mnster: Thaur, 2001), 28.
35
Jzef Niewiadomski and Raymund Schwager, Einfhrung, in Religion erzeugt Gewalt Einspruch! Innsbrucker
Forschungsprojekt Religion -Gewalt-Kommunikation-Weltordnung, ed. Raymund Schwager und Jzef
Niewiadomski (Beitrge zur mimetischen Theorie 15) (Mnster: Thaur, 2003), 26-7.

16

and the surrounding mimeticism, the Gospels set in motion the only textual mechanism that
can put an end to humanitys imprisonment in the system of mythological representation based
on the false transcendence of a victim who is made sacred because of the unanimous verdict
of guilt.36
The social anthropological mechanism between world order (differentiated cultural system)
and undifferentiated/anti-structural world-renunciation could be traced back to the softened,
sublimated system of representing persecution. Textual mechanism hidden in the Buddhist texts
representing the world-renouncing logic and philosophy of Buddhas
Religion is nothing but the enormous effort to maintain peace. It is, for Girard, been to focus
on peace, but are the way to that peace is not free of violent offerings. Religion is, according to
Girard, is entirely focused on peace, but the road to this peace are not free of violent sacrifices.37
In the center of Girard's theory stands the so-called mimetic cycle including the three
moments. First is mimetic crisis that caused by the mimetic rivalry. The second moment of the
mimetic cycle is the violence-canalizing collective power of the mechanism of mimetic
reconciliation that can generate a new order from the crisis. The third moment of the mimetic
cycle refers to the religious transfiguration and concealment of the mechanism of mimetic
reconciliation that takes its beginning in the sacralization of reconciliatory victims. According to
Girards (morpho)genetic thinking, both the central elements of any religion as myths, rituals
and taboos and political violence (e.g., the sacral kingship), the judicial power (e.g. death
penalty), the healing arts, theater, philosophy and anthropology can be traced back to the
mechanism of mimetic reconciliation.

1.2. Buddhism as Thought of the World-Renouncer

Although Buddhism seems to have a high sensitivity to the problems of desire, 38 but
Buddhist discourse on desire must be understood in a more nuanced social anthropological
contexts and roots. The Buddhist doctrine of desirelessness and the "ethic of disinterestedness"
(Ethik der Desinteressierung) may be considered to have a positive potential in the modern
world of jealousy.39 We need a social anthropologically nuanced notion of Buddhist (worldrenouncers ) concepts and logics. The Buddhist texts represent the thought of world-renouncer.
36

Ren Girard, The Scapegoat (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 166.
Ren Girard, Das Ende der Gewalt. Analyse des Menschheitsverhngnisses (Freiburg/Basel/Wien: Herder, 1983),
43.

37

38

Leo D. Lefebure, Mimesis, Violence, and Socially Engaged Buddhism: Overture to a Dialogue, in Contagion:
Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture 3 (1996), 127-128.
39
Peter Sloterdijk, Erwachen im Reich der Eifersucht. Notiz zu Ren Girards anthropologischer Sendung, in Ren
Girard, Ich sah den Satan vom Himmel fallen wie einen Blitz. Eine kritische Apologie des Christentums. Aus dem
Franzsischen von Elisabeth Mainberger-Ruh (Munich and Vienna: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2002), 242-54.

17

The religious texts, both Hindu and Buddhist, which emphasized the sasra-karma-moka
belief system, represent the thought of the world-renouncer (in Buddhism, of the monk).40
Buddhist logic and ethic of emptiness represents the world-renouncing thought of selfless
persons (yogic world-renouncers). As Gross 41 has rightly emphasized, Indian worldrenunciation is frequently misinterpreted by assumed similarities with Western asceticism, for
we are familiar with parallel Western forms of asceticism motivated by a different worldview
and different values. The literature of early Indian Buddhism primarily reflects the values of
world-renouncers set on the final goal.
Emptiness, selflessness and nothingness in Buddhism represent the very specific values of
world-renouncing and body-renouncing Buddhas and Bodhisattvas rather than the general
values of ordinary peoples. Many early Buddhist writings reflect "ascetic code of conduct."

42

The social anthropological re-reading of the Buddhist text is important for the proper
understanding of mimetic desire in Buddhism. For more precise understanding of the (mimetic)
desire, the correct interpretation of the world-renouncers desirelessness in yellow robe is
crucial. This anthropological reading of world-renouncing dimension of Buddhism avoids any
nihilistic or pessimistic misunderstanding. The Buddhist emptiness is not the same as nihilism,
but to comprehend as a specific dharma of world-renouncer. A close inspection of allegedly
deconstructive moves of Buddhist nothingness reveals that the world-renoucers dharma of
nothingness is actually sacrificial.
The Buddhist philosophy has also world-renouncing character. Between the previous
Skhya philosophy and world-renouncing life-style, there are close relationships.43 Buddhist
philosophical ideas are originated from world-renouncing and yogic rituals. Fragments of the
Mahynic philosophical ideas lie scattered in the Buddhist Tantras sometimes as speculations
on the nature of the truth and mainly in the context of the ceremonies and secret Yogic
practices. The study of these philosophical fragments has no value by itself, for they say
nothing new. The really important and interesting study, for Dasgupta, will be the study of the
history of the transformation of these philosophical ideas into esoteric theology and doctrines
and their association with the esoteric practices with which the Tantras is general abound. The
philosophical fragments occur more often in connection with the rituals, ceremonies and
esoteric yogic practices than independently. Meditation on the truth generally precedes all the
ceremonies, rituals and yogic practices. Apart from the popular traditions, some scholars are
disposed to think that in the Mahayna-str-lakra of Asaga there are clear references to the

40

Steven Collins, Selfless Persons: Imagery and Thought in Theravada Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1982) , 64.
41
Rita Gross, Buddhism After Patriarchy: A Feminist History: Analysis and Reconstruction of Buddhism (Albany:
State University of New York, 1993), 31.
42
Patrick Olivelle, Sanysa Upaniads: Hindu Scriptures on Asceticism and Renunciation, translated and with an
Introduction (New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 12.
43
Ibid., 14.

18

sexo-yogic practice of the Tntric Buddhists. Sylvain Lvi, according to Dasgupta, suggests that
parvtti of sexual act in the present context alludes to the mystic couples of Buddhas and
Bodhisattvas .44
Buddhist philosophical logics and ideas were originated from the rituals and esoteric yogic
practices. World-renouncers logic of undifferentiating nonduality was also originated from the
transgressive sexo-yogic practice of Dionysian couples of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. Buddhist
notion of emptiness and nothingness represents the world-renouncing yogis dharma and logic.
The Yogin is first of all to meditate on the nature of the world, and through deep
concentration of the mind to realize the nature of the phenomenal world as purely illusory.45 As
Conze has rightly pointed out, Buddhist thought are based on a number of implied
presuppositions that are rejected by modern European philosophers explicitly. Buddhist
philosophy sees the essential raw material for philosophical reflection in the yoga experience.46
Many Buddhist Pli words have "yogic significance": "Unfortunately, a translation is not
possible, partly because many Pli words bear yogic significance, whereas in our languages,
which have no vocabulary for these things in everyday life."47
The meaning of those concepts which affect the "very core of the sacred doctrine" reveals
itself, so Conze, "only in the state of religious rapture." Buddhist thought has been developed
for a (world-renouncing) sagha. Philosophical arguments and lines of thought are related
"only to the meditative practices of the monks. The formulation is clearly meant as an aid for
meditation, not as the basis of any rational speculation.48
Many of them are represented as undisputed fact that become visible to "the eyes of the
yogin" once he has reached "a state of gnosis."49 Did he only complete indifference to all
worldly things, may require such a "mind of the yogin himself nirvana". Conze50 writes about
the Mdhyamika-dialectics:
Granted - such a philosophy has something to offer little consolation for the common sense and
must plunge average men into breathtaking confusion ... The difficulty arises from the fact that
their ideas are not derived from the interests and problems of the man of the street, but from the
religious expectations of whom we call, because of the contrast, here man in jungle.

1.3. Derrida, Heidegger and Yogic Philosophy

44

S.B. Dasgupta, An Introduction to Tntric Buddhism (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1974), 34, 42, 53.
Ibid., 83.
46
Edward Conze, Buddhistisches Denken. Drei Phasen buddhistischer Philosophie in Indien (Frankfurt am Main:
Insel Verlag, 1988), 15.
47
Ibid., 105.
48
Ibid., 32-3, 40, 46.
49
Ibid., 74.
50
Ibid., 348.
45

19

Buddhist yogic philosophy represents the sacred and festive logics and thought of worldrenouncing man in wilderness and jungle rather than the common-sensical logics of the
Buddhist householders in village. Next to the "Buddhism of monks" that meditated on the four
truths, three features, "inverted views" and that such issues and sought for mystical oneness and
ultimate liberation "through yogic exercises, there was from the outset "Buddhism of laity and
kings" who sought a favorable rebirth. Buddhism of laity and the kings revolved around the
relics of the tathgata and around the stpa worship.51 Mdhyamikas have no thesis to prove,
their business is to contradict any and every thesis that may be offered by any school of
thought.52 This Buddhist negativistic denial of every thesis should be understood in the light of
world-negating business, dharma and logic of forest world-renouncer. A close reading of this
world-renouncers business and dharma to contradict and to negate any and every thesis
provides analytical scrutiny and interpretive persuasion for the proper understanding of these
Buddhist seemingly nihilistic or allegedly deconstructive nothingness.
Thus, in spite of superficial similarities, we conclude that there must be some fundamental
difference between yogic negativism of forest world-renouncer and western deconstruction. It
was argued that in his destruction of the principle of identity by reductio ad absurdum analysis
Ngrjuna employs the same logical strategy and often the very same arguments as are later
used by Derrida. But nyat (emptiness and nothingness) is intended by Ngrjuna to be a
soteriological therapy, not an ultimate truth or ontological category. A close look at the
Buddhist texts indicates that Buddhist yogic emptiness was taught with a world-negating
purpose for the forest world-renouncing Buddhas. The deconstruction of Buddhism has
something to do with the world-renouncing deconstruction of the world-renouncers body.53
Empty world-renouncers logic of nothingness as a kind of soteriological, that is to say, worldrenouncing obligation should not be confused with the Western postmodern or deconstructive
concepts.
Derridas critique of Western philosophy is said to fail only because it does not go far
enough. It has been pointed out how Ngrjuna is more systematic in his critique of all
metaphysical views than Derrida. Whereas Ngrjuna fully deconstructs both identity and
difference as opposing metaphysical dualities, Derrida is said to deconstruct only identity and to
remain attached to difference. Derridas deconstruction is said to end with difference, it, it is
argued, necessarily initiates a new swing of the pendulum of dualistic conceptualization
requiring yet another effort of deconstruction. Ngrjunas catukoi or four-pronged negation
shows the futility of attempting to take any sort of ultimate philosophical position. He
demonstrates the utter emptiness of all ontological statements. Ultimate emptiness of all
51

Ibid., 389.
Dasgupta, An Introduction to Tntric Buddhism, 14-5.
53
See Patrick Olivelle, "Deconstruction of the Body in Indian Asceticism." In Vincent L. Wimbush and Richard
Valantasis (eds.), Asceticism, 188-210 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
52

20

world-views is realized. Whereas for Buddhism language is empty of reality, for Derrida there
is no experience of reality outside of language. Whereas for Derrida language is the means for
the experience of the real, for Ngrjuna language as vikalpa or imaginary construction is the
obstacle (avidy ) to be removed. In spite of apophatic strain in Derrida who deals with
negative theology as an interpretation of silence, his deconstructive analysis is more afffirmative
than nihilistic in nature.54
An important difference separating Buddhist thinkers from Derrida is that for Nagarjuna,
unlike Derrida, the ultimate aim of thought is a final and complete oblieration (nyat nyat)
of every affirmation, even the most fragile. Derrida, on the other hand, aims to multiply
significations, not to transcend them. 55 This world-renouncers complete oblieration and
negation of every affirmation must be read as sacrificial rather than deconstructive or apohatic.
The anti-logical logic and philosophy and destructive nature of Ngrjunas arguments should
be viewed within the larger context of world-renuncation as anti-structure (Dumont) and of antistructural dharma of Buddhist world-renouncer. In terms of the civilizational (founding)
paradox of world-constructing world-renunciation, we can comprehend the violent paradox of
anti-logical Buddhist logic. A great Buddhist philosopher like Ngrjuna was at heart antilogic-of-his-times and paradoxically can be placed in the history of development of Indian
logic. Reinterpreting dependent origination through his philosophy of emptiness (nyat),
Ngrjuna rejects all positions by means of reductio ad absurdum (prasaga). Ngrjuna played
quite an important role in the history of Indian logic, by initiating the method of argument
which was in essence reductio ad absurdum. He was at heart anti-logic, but he was certainly
quite logical in his actual arguments.56

1.4.Nothingness as World-renouncers Dharma

The seemingly deconstructive Buddhist and Mdhyamikas business to to contradict and
negate any and every thesis should be comprehended against the backdrop of anti-structural
dharma of self-negating world-renouncer. nyat as world-renouncers dharma is intended to
be a soteriological logic and has something to do with sacrificial self-destruction of homeless,
desireless and ontologically empty Buddhas. The founding and differentiating mechanism of
surrogate victim around the world-renouncer is to be deconstructed. Violent paradox around

54

Harold G. Coward, Derrida and Indian Philosophy (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1990),
126-47.
55
Richard A. Cohen, Elevations: The Height of the Good in Rosenzweig and Levinas (Chicago: Chicago University
Press, 1994), 315, footnote 11.
56
Shry Katsura, Ngrjuna and the Tetralemma (Catukoi),, in Gajin Nagao, Jonathan A. Silk, Wisdom,
Compassion, and the Search for Understanding: the Buddhist Studies Legacy of Gadjin M. Nagao (Honolulu:
University of Hawai'i Press, 2000), 201-19.

21

sacred world-renouncer seems to be related to the fundamental and founding misrecognition.

Girard argues that such misrecognition opens the way not only for difference itself, for religious
and cultural differentiation, but also for the infinite diversity of concrete forms of religion. The
whole theory is based on the already interpretive character of religious pheonomena in relation
to the founding event. As J. M.

Oughourlian says, the theoy of the surrogate victim is

proffered as the only true reading of an event that has already been interpreted by all cultural
texts, even those that deny its existence, since any such denial is only a particularly mystified
form of interpretation. Girards thesis is primarily a theory of human relations and of the role
that the mechanism of victimage plays in those relations.57 I want to eloborate on the role that
mechanism of victimage plays in human relations between world-renouncer and worldly
householder.
Derridas own characterization of Eastern thought, according to Magliola, charges that the
East offers no more than variations of logocentrism. Magliola argues that Nagarjunas
nyat (devoidness) is Derridas diffrance, and is the absolute negation which absolutely
deconstitutes but which constitutes directional trace. 58 But world-renouncing devoidness
represents anthropologically specific concept of world-renouncer and means the absolute
negation of world-renuncers ritual and civil self-identity.
Neglecting this sacrificial dimension of Buddhist, or more exactly world-renouncers
deviodness, David Tracy argues that the nearest affinity to Buddhist thought (or, more exactly,
to the Mahayana Buddhism of Ngrjuna as that radical form of Buddhism is rethought in
contemporary terms by the modern Kyoto school of Nishida, Tanabe, Nishitani, Abe and others)
is to be found in neither Hegel nor Whitehead nor Dewey but in certain contemporary strands of
post-modern thought like that of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida. Perhaps the greatest
affinity between much French deconstructive and Kyoto Buddhist thought is said to be the
common insistence on the illusionary character of the self and thereby of any modern Western
attempt to use that self to ground or provide a foundation for reality. This critique of the
logocentism (with Derrida) or the onto-theo-logical character of all Western philosophy and
theology (with Heidegger) or the foundationalism of Western transcendental and
metaphysical enterprises (with Rorthy), in Tracys view, is remarkably similar to the strangely
metaphysical, yet anti-metaphysical, character of much contemporary Buddhist thought. For
any Buddhist notion of not-two (non-duality) seems, Tracy asserts, lacking in both Deleuzes
sheer celebration of Nietzschean difference and Derridas merging of difference and deferral to
yield radically undecidable diffrence and dissemination. The anti-dialectics of the
deconstructionists, for Tracy, celebrate difference and the anti-dialectical dialectics of the
Kyoto school signal non-duality. In both philosophy (as in Derrida and Deleuze), in Lacanian
57

Ren Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World. Research undertaken in collaboration with JeanMichel Oughourlian and Guy Lefort (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 44.
58
Robert R. Magliola, Derrida on the Mend (West Lafayette, In, U.s.a.: Purdue University Press, 1984), 88-9.

22

anti-ego psychology and anti-Jungian psychoanalysis, and in most post-modern literature, even
the transient epiphanies of the great literary modernists are now gone. Indeed post-modern
thought, Tracy goes on to argue, wishes to dissolve all modernist epiphanies as surely as
Buddhist thought dissolves the great archetypes of presence of the archaic traditions and the
true self of Vedanta. Like the Buddhists attack on Vedantic thought, the post-moderns are
said to reject every form of presence now labelled pejoratively logocentrism and
foundationalism in Western literature and philosophy.59
It must be recognized that despite some superficial affinities to French deconstructive
philosophy, Buddhist insistence on the illusionary character of the self hides the mystified form
of interpretation and the founding misrecognition of the illusionary and empty world-renouncer
self. Buddhist dissolving thought stems from the world-renouncing and yogic logic of forest
Buddhas who are obliged to dissolve and to undifferentiate the differentiated system of presence
and self-identity. The strangely metaphysical, yet anti-metaphysical, character of much
contemporary Buddhist thought could be comprehended in the light of the founding paradox of
Buddhist world order (metaphysical differentiation) based on the chaotic and Dionysian worldrenunciation (anti-metaphysical undifferentiation).
The strong sacrificial implications of Buddhist (world-renouncers) devoidness and
nothingness has been neglected in the comparative study of Heidegger, Eckhart, and Zen
Buddhism. For Caputo, the question of Heideggers mysticism cannot be explored solely in
terms of his relationship to Meister Eckhart but must also include the intriguing question of
Heideggers relationship to the East. For it may well be that the step back out of Western
philosophy the very expression is redundant results in adopting the spiritual attitude of the
East. There was a connection or link between Heidegger and Zen. Meister Eckhart is frequently
pointed to as a Christian mystic whose experience seems to be remarkably like Zen. Like
Buddha and Eckhart, Heidegger, Caputo argues, knows the root of metaphysics, which he
locates not in desire or self-will but in something analogous: subjectism, the attachment of the
ego cogito to its own representations and principles. Eckharts concept of Abgeschiedenheit
is said to bear a striking resemblance to nyat. The Zen teaching of nyat was related to
Heideggers notion of the Nothing (das Nichts). But Caputo rightly points out one
fundamental difference between Heidegger and Eckhart on the one hand, and Zen on the other :
neither Heidegger nor Eckhart wishes to destroy or weaken the real distinction between beings,
to reduce particularity to an epiphenomenon, as is done in Zen. Heidegger does not want to
say that the death of the individual is ultimately unreal, nor would Eckhart want to deny
that each soul is a unique creation of God. Both are, on this point at least, very Western. 60

59

David Tracy, Dialogue With the Other: The Inter-Religious Dialogue (Louvain, Belgium: Peeters Press, 1990), 70-

2.
60

John D. Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heideggers Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 1986),
203-12.

23

Fundamental difference between Meditative (besinnliche) Abgeschiedenheit on the one hand,

and strong sacrificial devoidness or nothingness (nyat.) as world-renouncing yogis dharma
on the other , should not be neglected. Social anthropological concept explication of Buddhist
nothingness in the sense of world-renouncers negating and negativistic dharma enables us to
see its sacrificial origins and implications. All mysticisms privilege emptiness, but there, as
Faure persuasively argues, are different kinds of emptiness. The Buddhist emptiness is not that
of Christian mystics such as Meister Eckhart.61 Therefore, the sacrificial implications and
dimensions of Buddhist (world-renouncers ) nyat must be taken into consideration.
The Zen master tells us that nyat can only be grasped by a thought which is no
thought. Where Hui-neng teaches the doctrine of letting go of yourself, Heidegger, according
to Caputo, teaches letting-be (Gelassenheit). Heidegger also speaks of meditative
(besinnlich) thinking. In Zen, Heidegger and Eckhart there, in Caputos view, is a very
comparable letting-go of all rational, calculative, and teleological thinking. 62 But Heideggers
meditative (besinnlich) thought should not be confused with the egoless world-renouncers
yogic meditation on death and devoidness. Buddhist (world-renouncers) letting-go means the
yogic world-renouncers sacrificial homelessness and death.
iek has rightly pointed out essential difference between Heidegger and Buddhism. Some
deeper affinity between Heidegger and Oriental thought, mostly Buddhism has been postulated.
But for iek, when Heidegger speaks about the Ereignis (appropriating event), he thereby
introduces a dimension, that, precisely, is missing in Buddhism, that of the fundamental
historicity of Being. Although the Buddhist ontology desubstantializes reality into a pure
flow of singular events, what it cannot think, for iek, is the eventuality of the Void of Being
itself. The goal of Buddhism is to enable a person to achieve enlightenment through
traversing the illusion of the self and rejoining the Void what is unthinkable within this
space is Heideggers notion of the human being as Da-Sein, as the being-there of the being
itself, as the site of the event-arrival of Being. iek asks: Can one imagine a Buddhist
claiming that the Void (nyat) itself needs humans as the site of its arrival ?

63

Buddhist ontology representing the world-renouncing thought of forest Buddhas

desubstantializes reality into a pure flow of singular events and undifferentiates the
differentiated cultural system.

61

Bernard Faure, Double Exposure: Cutting Across Buddhist and Western Discourses, translated by Janet Lloyd
(Standford: Standford University Press, 2004), 80.
62
Caputo, The Mystical Element in Heideggers Thought, 213-5.
63
Slavoj iek, Thinking Backward: Predestination and Apocalypse, 185-210, in John Milbank, Slavoj iek,
Creston Davis, Pauls New Moment: Continental Philosophy and the Future of Christian Theology (Grand Rapids,
MI :Brazos Press, 2010), 207-8.

24

1.5. Buddhism as World-renouncers Pure Soteriology

For the specifically Buddhist understanding of (mimetic) desire, it is also crucial to
understand the character of Buddhism as a 'doctrine of salvation' and 'pure soteriology'.
Buddhism as pure soteriology was less interested in preserving the social order, than with the
'liberation' (moka). The Buddhist way can be identified with world-renouncer path to
liberation. In India, we usually speak of such a religion as a 'path' (mrga, panth ) - a path to
liberation.
The pure soteriology is, acoording to Gombrich, distinguishable from the "religion of the
people in society" ("communal religion"). Buddhism as a doctrine of liberation differs from the
kind of religion that focuses, according to Durkheim, on the order of society. Gombrich64 has
used the difference between "soteriological" and "communalist" religion on the history of
Buddhism. Only in the 1970s, Theravda Buddhists of Sri Lanka developed a specifically
Buddhist wedding ceremony. Until then (and for most of them until today), the marriage was a
"purely secular matter" like most other major life events. The Buddha preached a (worldrenouncing) soteriology. He was not much interested in communal religion, which he
regarded as something to be left behind as one took to the quest for salvation. While some forms
of Mahyna Buddhism did manage to evolve a communal religion from within themselves of
this the Newar Buddhism of Nepal is an excellent example Theravda, more conservative,
preserved the Buddhas indifference to communal religion. The Buddha was so clear that his
path was directed to leaving the world altogether. For Buddhists communal religion necessarily
includes any attempt to better ones lot in this life by recourse to magic or the intervention of
gods. Only the professional salvation-seekers, were required by the Buddha to renounce
conformity to the norms of the wider society.65
The un-self-conscious creation of a Buddhist wedding ceremony on the Chritian model
can best be interpreted through the religious reform movement of the late nineteenth century
which we label Protestant Buddhism. Tradionally Buddhist monks did not work, and the
Buddha had nothing to do with marriage.66The Buddhist undertaking not to kill also has not
generally been so interpreted as to impose vegetarianism- never a norm for Sinhala Buddhists.
The third precept in Buddhism enjoins abstention from illicit sexual behaviour, but Buddhism
nowhere attempts to define the right kind of marriage for laymen, and Buddhist societies have
permitted monogamy, polyandry, and polygamy all of which have indeed been customary in
various segments of Sinhala Buddist society. This indifference to lay morals, so long as they
64

Richard Gombrich: Der Theravada-Buddhismus: Vom alten Indien bis zum modernen Sri Lanka (Stuttgart, Berlin,
Kln: Kohlhammer 1997), 35-7.
65
Richard Gombrich, Theravda Buddhism : A Social History from Ancient Benares to Modern Colombo (London:
Routledge, 1988), 28.
66
Richard Gombrich and Gananath Obeyesekere, Buddhism Transformed. Religious Change in Sri Lanka (Delhi:
Motilal Banarsidass, 1990), xi-xii.

25

did not violate the Buddhist precepts (for world-renouncer), explains the fact that neither monks
nor Buddist sacred objects have been involved in rites of passage in traditional Sri Lanka
excepting only death rituals.

67

Strictly speaking, it would be difficult to speak of a Buddhist social order.68 Buddha did not
want a new world order, which follows its own laws: The teaching of the Buddha is indeed a
teaching for all people, but it is, according to its original purpose, not a theory for the
structuring of life in the world, but a teaching to liberation, therefore, to liberation from the
world. Therefore, Buddha did not want to give a new order for the world in this sense, such as
Muhammad intended.69
Max Weber70 has formulated: " Neither the old nor the later Buddhism has tried to change
the world within the social order. The world was indifferent to the monk." Buddha did not form
a religion meant for the masses, but he did form a world-renouncing community meant
exclusively for the monks. Proliferation of this community was made possible through the
extension of monasteries and the development of a monastic culture in which a layman had
practically nothing to do. Buddha did not prescribe any Dharmastra comprising the codes of
individual and social behavior, civil and criminal laws, rules relating to marriage, divorce,
inheritance, etc., for the lay devotees, though for the monks he did make elaborate rules and
regulations prepared meticulously, which were later crystallized in the Vinaya Piaka.71
Hans Kng72 has rightly observed a dual structure between the 'authentic' monastic and
'inauthentic'

lay

existence

(Dualstruktur

zwischen

eigentlicher

monastischer

und

uneigentlicher laikaler Existenz). Monasticism is for Buddhism, unlike in Christianity, the

basis. Monasticism was destroyed, as the case in India through Islam, Buddhism was in fact hurt
to to the heart. Buddhism developed "no code of conduct laid down for lay practitioners" and
disappeared from India.73 Buddha's message was radical in their world-negation that it could
correspond to, in fact, only the monastic lifestyle. Not so with Jesus. In order to belong to the
communion of Jesus, to his 'brother' or 'sister' it was not necessary to change the state of life.74
67

Ibid., 28.
Richard Gombrich, Einleitung: Der Buddhismus als Weltreligion, in Der Buddhismus. Geschichte und
Gegenwart, ed. Heinz Bechert und Richard Gombrich (Mnchen: C.H. Beck, 1984), 18.
69
Heinz Bechert , Vorwort, in Der Buddhismus. Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. Heinz Bechert und Richard
Gombrich (Mnchen: C.H. Beck, 1984), 9-10.
70
Max Weber, Gesammelte Aufstze zur Religionssoziologie II/ Hinduismus und Buddhismus (Tbingen: J.C.B.
Mohr [(Paul Siebeck], 1966), 247.
71
N.N. Bhattacharyya, Buddhism in the History of Indian Ideas (New Delhi: Manohar, 1993), 187.
72
Hans Kng, Eine christliche Antwort, in Christentum und Weltreligionen. Hinfhrung und Dialog mit Islam,
Hinduismus und Buddhismus, ed. Hans Kng, Josef von Ess, Heinrich von Stietencron, Heinz Bechert ( Mnchen:
Piper. 1984), 488-9.
73
Andrea Luithle, Von Asketen und Kaufleuten. Reinheit, Reichtum und soziale Organisation bei den vetmbaraJaina im westlichen Indien, in Nicole Manon Lehmann und Andrea Luithle, Selbstopfer und Entsagung im Westen
Indiens. Ethnologische Studien zum Sati-Ritual und zu den Shvetambara Jaina (Hamburg: Verlag Dr. Kovac, 2003),
359.
74
Kng, Eine christliche Antwort, 488-9.
68

26

With La Valle Poussin, Dumont75 pointed out the difference between the lay-Buddhism as
a religion and Buddhism of the monks, which is a 'doctrine of liberation'76: The fact that
householder takes concepts that are essential to the world-renouncer, must not conceal the
profound difference between the two states, the two mentalities. Buddhists believe that where
the Buddhist Sagha extinct, Buddhism itself is dead.77 Doctrinal Buddhism is characterized
by the existence of a double standard one which upholds a clear-cut distinction between
virtuoso and layman, but also avoids total disconnection between the two in a vareity of ways.
The quest for nirvana remains the realm of the virtuoso (world-renouncer), who is able and
willing to engage in the path of forest world-renunciation and meditation, while meritaccumulation, with no immediate soteriological relevance, provides secondary goals for
others. What is involved here is a matter not merely of differentiation, but of hierarchy. The
(worldly) lay world of Buddhism is allowed a significant degree of autonomy. But it is never
conceived as the locus of liberation. Neither is it supposed to model itself after the highest
Buddhist ideals.78
Although many Buddhists throughout history have known the teaching of the four truths in
more or less detail, not very many have actively set out to destory the ignorance of self and
achieve nirva through the practice of meditation. Lay people tended to see this as the business
of monks, and most monks tended to see it as the business of the relatively few among them
who seriously practiced meditation. Even for such monks, the practice of meditation should be
understood as a ritual act in a ritual seeting, replete with devotions to the three jewels.79 Thus
Buddhist meditation should be viewed as a very specific ritual act of world-renouncer.

1.6.World-renouncers Negativism
Because of the specific world-renouncing character, Buddhist ethics of bhiku is considered
as "even anti-social (if this expression is not understood pejoratively)."80 The negativism
pervading the whole of Buddhism81 is not to misunderstand as nihilism, but is to interpret it as
world-renouncing negativism. The "life-negating mood (lebensverneinende Stimmung) in the
speeches and poems of the Buddhist literature82 represents the specific mood and values of
75

Louis Dumont, Gesellschaft in Indien. Die Soziologie des Kastenwesens (Wien: Europa-Verlag, 1976), 316.
Ibid., 228.
77
Gombrich, Einleitung: Der Buddhismus als Weltreligion, 16.
78
Ilana Friedrich-Silber, Dissent Through Holiness: The Case of the Radical Renouncer in Theravada Buddhist
Communities, in Numen: International Review for the History of Religions 23 (1981), 167-70.
79
Donald S. Lopez, Jr, Introduction, Buddhism in Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 19.
80
Ulrich Schneider, Einfhrung in den Buddhismus (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1987), 116.
81
Heinrich Dumoulin, stliche Meditation und christliche Mystik (Freiburg i. Br. / Mnchen : Verlag Karl Alber,
1966), 29.
82
Helmut V. Glasenapp, Nachwort: Herman Oldenberg und sein Lebenswerk, in Hermann Oldenberg, Buddha.
Sein Leben, Seine Lehre, Seine Gemeinde, ed. Helmut von Glasenapp. Stuttgart. 13. Auflage. 1959, 476.
76

27

Buddhist world-renouncer. Buddhas message was a pure soteriology of world-renunciation.

Gombrich disagrees with many modern interpreters of Buddhism, including some Buddhists.
Under the impact both of western ideas of ethnicity and of western scholarship, some Buddhists
themselves have in modern times been affected by the misunderstandings which Gombrich
aspire to dispel. Thus they have come to regard Buddhism and Hinduism as entities precisely
on a par with the monothestic relgions (primarily Christianity and Islam), and consequently to
regard Buddhist and Hindu as total and mutually exclusive identities.83
Thus this Buddhist world-renouncers yogic anti-structural negativism should not be easily
confused with the Derrdian deconstructionism. A comparative study of Derridas deconstructive
philosophy and the Mdhyamika Buddhism, for example the seemingly remarkable parallel
between the Derridean logic and the Mdhyamika prasaga (reductio ad absurdum) has been
examined by a number of specialists in comparative philosophy. The Mdhyamika School is
well known for their logical proposition called four-cornered logic (tetralemmna).
Tetralemmna is a form of logical argumentation whose use is not limited to Mdhyamika in
the Buddhist tradition. The tetralemma violates the basic Aristotelian logic of identity,
contradiction, and the excluded middle. The strategy Derrida has used in executing the
deconstruction of a text is said to have shown a pattern that leads to a conclusion similar to the
one arrived at with the tetralemma of the Mdhyamika. A deconstructive reading is said to
demonstrate the limits of a discourse and metaphysical thinking similar to the way in which the
Mdhyamika shows the impossibility of maintaining an essentialist viewpoint. Derridean and
Mdhyamika deconstruction are said to declare the end of philosophy and the beginning of
non-philosophy. By jettisoning philosophy itself, Derrida is said to led himself into the prison
house of language, whereas to the Mdhyamika Buddhists, the end of philosophy is
synonymous with religious enlightenment beyond language and conceptuality. It was also
maintained that the textual dissemination liberated by Derridas deconstruction will not be
satisfactory unless the dualistic sense-of-self not just its discourse has been deconstructed.
It has rightly been pointed out that Buddhism is distinguished from postmodern thought in that
Derridas critique of transcendental signifieds includes doubts about the possibility of such
mystical experiences involved in meditation.84
As noted earlier, Buddhist emptiness and nothingness represents the desireless, egoless and
empty world-renouncers yogic logic. Forest world-renouncer undifferentiates the dualistic or
differential sense of self. Buddhist tetralemma violating the basic Aristotelian logic should be
read as a forest and Dionysian logic of world-renouncer as the differentiating victim who
violates, transgresses and undifferentiates the common-sensical logic of worldly housholder.
The Buddhist non-substantial mode of thinking turns out to be a sacrificial logic of nonsubstantial and empty world-renouncer. In spite of some parrelles between deconstructive
83
84

Gombrich, Theravda Buddhism : A Social History from Ancient Benares to Modern Colombo, 29-30.
Jin Y. Park, Buddhisms and Deconstructions (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 43-5.

28

philosophy and the Mdhyamika Buddhism, the fundamental difference between Western
philosophy of deconstructionism and Buddhist (world-renouncers) yogic philosophy and logic
has to be taken into consideration. Girardian hermeneutics of suspicion promotes a more
deconstructive reading of Buddhist world-renouncers logic of sacrificial emptiness. What needs
to be deconstructed is the mystified textual mechanism around or against the sacred, liminal and
ambivalent world-renouncing forest Buddhas who violate and undifferentiate the differentiated
logic and cultural system. A deconstructive reading of Buddhist logic of the violence and the
sacred surrrounding these specialists of the sacred (Buddhas) seeks to understand the sacrificial
mechanism hidden behind this Buddhist (world-renouncers) non-philosophy and the end of
philosophy, which is synonymous with world-renouncers sacrificial death beyond language and
conceptuality.
Buddhism as a world-renouncers soteriology had to do originally so little with the social
order. But paradoxically, the Buddhist world-renunciation as a sacred anti-strucutre had played
a creative or founding, differentiating and structuring role. Girards theory helps us to grasp this
civilizational paradox of Buddhist world order based on the world-renouncing and worldrenouncers nothingness. The principal function of the surrogate victim is to restore and solidify
difference.85 Surrogate victim is the founding agent in all religion and culture. Girards insights
into the origins, genesis and maintenance of culture allow us to achieve a more precise
understanding of the civilizational paradox of the Buddhist world order through worldrenunciation.
The Buddhist desirelessness originally represents desirelessness of world-renouncer in his
homelessness. The householder produces and reproduces. Desire is necessary and even laudable
for the father of family life. Desire belongs to the social plan of life and the world order. Desire
guarantees the continued existence of society. Unlike householder, the Buddhist worldrenouncer "neither produce nor reproduce," because for him desire is death.86 The Buddhist
Bhikusagha forbade its members to participate in productive agricultural activity, "and even
to cook their own meals. The work as such enjoyed no esteem, and that meant the complete
material dependence of the Bhiku on the householder.87
Indian asceticism that can be described in nature as a Selbstvergottungsmystik is different
from Western-Christian asceticism that are Arbeitsaskese in nature.
sacralizing

mechanism

of

reconcilatory

victim,

we

will

88

By considering

eloborate

on

this

Selbstvergottungsmystik in Buddhism.
85

Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 303.

Gombrich, Der Theravada-Buddhismus: Vom alten Indien bis zum modernen Sri Lanka, 55-7.
87
Stanley J. Tambiah, Max Webers Untersuchung des frhen Buddhismus. Eine Kritik, in Max Webers Studie ber
Hinduismus und Buddhismus. Interpretation und Kritik, ed. Wolfgang Schluchter (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp,
1984), 218-9.
88
Wolfgang Schluchter, Weltflchtiges Erlsungsstreben und organische Sozialethik. berlegungen zu Max Webers
Analysen der indischen Kulturreligionen, in Max Webers Studie ber Hinduismus und Buddhismus. Interpretation
und Kritik, ed. Wolfgang Schluchter, 38.
86

29

In the Vinaya texts, the Buddhist monk appears in a series of oppositions with other
social categories the chief of which are the lay householder, the Brahman, the members of other
wandering sects. At the most general level, the Buddhist monk is distinguished from the
householder in a variety of ways. There are many rules which eloquently express this contrast.
The resources of the bhikkhu according to these texts are mendicancy, clothing in cast-off rags,
forest life, and using urine as medicine. The contrast between the homeless wanderer and the
stable householder is clear in the early rule that except in the rainy season, the monk was not to
stay in a place for more than three days. The contrast between the bhikkhu and the
householder is expressed through clothing and supported by rules which describe how a bhikkhu
should walk, laugh, talk and eat so that his distinction from the householder is maintained. In
ther matter of acceptance of food, the rules which emphasize his acceptance of cooked food
without any discrimination from any devotee constitute a rejection of the orthodox rules of
commensality.89
Paradoxically that world-renouncers withdrawal became the basis of power in the world
and possessed a dynamic, innovative potential. As I will elaborate later, the early doctrinal
preoccupation of Buddhism with the relation between (world-renouncing) virtuosi and laity is
itself rooted in a very distinctive mode of coexistence, or economy, of otherworldly and
worldly orientations. Buddhisms world-renouncing orientation had led many students of
Buddhism to see it as a monkish creed in which the laity was largely neglected and debased,
or, in Webers terms, as a soteriology of the elite only. The important point of contact
perhaps the most crucial for the historical development of the relation between virtuoso and
society is through the articulation of an elaborate gift relationship between world-renouncer
and worldly householder. Whatever the theory, world-renouncer and householder are
undoubtedly thrown, through the medium of dana, into a highly ritualized and necessary
interaction.90
The Buddhist morality appears primarily as a "condemnation and categorization of the vices
and passions," i.e. the "main obstacles on the path to salvation." Buddhist morality has little to
do with the so-called worldly (laukika) virtues. Buddhism pays attention to the "very
specifically Buddhist virtues of the so-called world-renouncing (lokottara) virtues.

91

The

world-renouncers desirelessness and detachment originally belonged to this "specific Buddhist

virtues." The ideal of Hindu-Buddhist world-renunciation - the "antithesis" to the ritual

89

Veena Das, Paradigms of Body Symbolism: An Analysis of Selected Themes in Hindu Culture, 180-207,
Richard Burghart and Audrey Cantlie(eds), Indian Religion. Collected Papers on South Asia No. 7 (New York: St.
Martins Press, 1985), p. 190-2.
90
Ilana Friedrich-Silber, Virtuosity, Charisma, and Social Order: A Comparative Sociological Study of Monasticism
in Theravada Buddhism and medieval Catholicism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, p. 47-68.
91
Andr Bareau, Der indische Buddhismus, in Andr Bardeau, Walter Schubring, Christoph von Frer-haimendorf,
Die Religion Indiens. III. Buddhismus-Jinismus-Primitvvlkert (Die Religionen der Menschheit. Band 13), ed.
Christel Matthias Schrder. Stuttgart 1964, 42-3.

30

Brahminism and the ideal of the Buddhist Bhikhu as "counter-culture"92 have produced no new
motivations or orientations concerning politics and economics.93Tambiah points out that the
Buddhist Bhikusagha is to be understood as a kind of negative to the householder. The
lifestyle of world-renouncer has its meaningful only as opposed to the lifestyle of the
householder.94
We must take into consideration the "dialogue" between world-renouncer in his
homelessness and householder in his village life.95 At no point is the principle of worldrenunciation as such expected to govern laymen in worldly affairs, nor is the world-renouncer
himself expected to be directly involved in the supervision and management of the social order.
World-renouncer does not intend to act directly on the social order. This makes virtuosi a very
special type of elite, combining a status of ultimate superiority with a narrowly defined
involvement in and lack of control upon secular and collective life. The Buddhist lay world,
although undoubtedly deemed inferior, is allowed a significant degree of autonomy. It is of
crucial significance that lay world is never conceived as the locus of salvation. Neither is it
supposed to model itself after the highest Buddhist ideals. At no point is the principle of worldrenunciation as such expected to govern laymen in worldly affairs.96

2.

Founding Paradox of Buddhist World Civilization

2.1. Civilizational Dynamics of World-Negating Buddhism
The civilizational dynamics of a world-negating religion in Buddhist culture could be well
illuminated by Girards theory on founding mechanism of surrogate victim. World-renunciation,
a tenet having evident asocial or even antisocial implications, is venerated as a central ideal
in Theravada Buddhist countries. The radical forest world-renouncer (radical virtuosi) are
those numerically negligible adhering to a more radical renunciation, entailing a greater
disconnection from the lay world. The radical virtuoso, evokes ambivalent attitudes in
Theravada societies: thus, he can inspire the greatest awe as well as the object of suspicion and
92

Tambiah, Max Webers Untersuchung des frhen Buddhismus. Eine Kritik, 212.
Shmuel N. Eisenstadt, Die Paradoxie von Zivilisationen mit auerweltlichen Orientierungen. berlegungen zu
Max Webers Studie ber Hinduismus und Buddhismus, in Max Webers Studie ber Hinduismus und Buddhismus.
Interpretation und Kritik. ed. Wolfgang Schluchter (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), 352.
94
Tambiah, Max Webers Untersuchung des frhen Buddhismus. Eine Kritik, 220.
95
Dumont, Gesellschaft in Indien. Die Soziologie des Kastenwesens, 311-2.
96
Ilana Friedrich-Silber, Dissent Through Holiness: The Case of the Radical Renouncer in Theravada Buddhist
Communities, in Numen: International Review for the History of Religions. 23 (1981), 164-171; Eisenstadt, Die
Paradoxie von Zivilisationen mit auerweltlichen Orientierungen. berlegungen zu Max Webers Studie ber
Hinduismus und Buddhismus, 351.
93

31

disapproval. This type of religious virtuosi achieved neither a subversive nor transformative
influence of significance upon wider society. While undoubtedly charismatic in a certain sense
since they could become the object of extreme veneration such men, according to Silber, did
not originate any full-fledged heterodoxies or movements of dissent and can be said to have
retained, on the whole, a charisma of a non-innovative, non-revolutionary type. This clearly
differs, for example, from the part played by religious radicalism throughout the history of
Christian civilization, especially as it culminated in the far-reaching impact of the Protestant
Reformation upon Western society the Weberian theme. For Silber, there was always the
ambivalence toward these radical virtuosi and they never achieved more than a marginal
position in Burma, Thailand and Ceylon. Mechanisms which appear to have evolved in
Theravada Buddhism, in Silbers view, tend to segregate renunciation and its institutionalized
representatives from worldier society and orientations. The Sanghas political activity,
according to Silber, never amounted to the type of autonomous political power displayed by the
Catholic Church in Western Europe.97
Girards mimetic theory has a definite explanatory value and power for the understanding of
the paradoxical unity of world renouncer and world conqueror (Tambiah).98 Therefore, the
Buddhist or world-renouncing values is not to misunderstand as nihilism, but one must
recognize paradoxical creativity of world-renunciation. In his essay Die Paradoxie von
Zivilisationen mit auerweltlichen Orientierungen. berlegungen zu Max Webers Studie ber
Hinduismus und Buddhismus, Eisenstadt has highlighted this civilizational paradox of this
Buddhist world order based on other-worldly or world-renouncing orientations. It is a fact that
the other-worldly doctrines produced no strong alternative conceptions of social and political
order.99 Girards seminal explanation of genesis and maintenance of culture sheds new light on
the founding paradox of Buddhist world civilization based on the other-worldly or worldrenouncing

orientations
100

Orientierungen).

(Weltzivilisationen

auf

der

Grundlage

auerweltlicher

Girard's mimetic theory concerning the genesis of the order can explain

persuasively the paradoxical world order that is due to an other-worldly or world-renouncing

orientation. This study attempts to account for this civilizational paradox of the creative worldrenunciation. The ideal of Hindu-Buddhist world-renunciation - the "antithesis" to the ritual
Brahmanism and the ideal of the Buddhist Bhikhu as "counter-culture"101 have produced no
new motivations or orientations regarding politics and economics.
97

Friedrich-Silber, Dissent Through Holiness: The Case of the Radical Renouncer in Theravada Buddhist
Communities, 164-71.
98
Stanley J. Tambiah, World Conqueror and World Renouncer. A Study of Buddhism and Polity in Thailand against
a historical Background (Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology 15) (Cambridge, London, New York:
Cambridge University Press, 1977).
99
Eisenstadt, Die Paradoxie von Zivilisationen mit auerweltlichen Orientierungen. berlegungen zu Max Webers
Studie ber Hinduismus und Buddhismus, 351.
100
Ibid., 334-6.
101
Tambiah, Max Webers Untersuchung des frhen Buddhismus. Eine Kritik, 212.

32

Indebted to Eisenstadt, Silber explores the social position of virtuoso ascetics in two
civilizations traditional Theravada Buddhism and medieval Catholicism in which they
achieved a position of considerable prestige and cultural ascendancy. Virtuoso asceticism, for
Silber, emerges as a vital factor not only in the rise of the West, but also in the ideolological
expansion of the Buddhist East. Merging Weberian sociology with the Maussian tradition of gift
analysis, Silber has provided a comparative macrosociological study of the interaction between
religious virtuosi and society in two civilizations. Buddhist world renouncer represents a kind of
decentered centrality not found in this precise configuration in any other civilizational setting.
Institutionally, Buddhist world renouncer were always defined as withdrawn from the center of
secular rule and control, even though they were to become vital, at times, to the centers
spiritual concerns, symbolic legitimacy, and even political expansion. The cultural status of the
Buddhist world-renouncer, however prestigious and central, was rife with ambiguities. There
is a common contrast of Buddhist otherworldly weakness with Western power and
dynamism in matters of institution building and worldly involvement. This contrast is heavily
emphasized in Webers own work, where it seems to have been rooted, in Silbers view, in his
overrriding concern with the unique features of Western rationality. For Weber, only religious
orientations inducive of what he designated as active, innerworldy asceticism could habe
encouraged a sustained, rationalized involvement in the world of the type which was to become
so crucial, in his eyes, to the development of Western modernity. By stressing the
macrosociological significance of a process of interaction and exchange concretely
expressed, in the development of a gift relationship between Buddhist forest world-renouncer
and householder , Silber argues that concern with the unique dynamics of the West should be
matched with an equal concern for the unique dynamics of Buddhist civilizations.102
Girardian reading of the violent paradox of Buddhist civililization based on worldrenouncing nothingness and emptiness attempts to explain this very specific civilizational
developments of Buddhist culture.103 We read this process of interactional exchange (gift
relationship) and unique dynamics and paradox of Buddhist civilizations rooted in worldrenouncing orientations in the light of founding mechanism of surrogate victim. Girardian
mechanism of founding victim can serve as a hermeneutical key to interpret the mechanisms
which appear to have evolved in (Theravada) Buddhism and to have enabled this civilization to
cope with the other-worldliness of its own ideals. These mechanisms tend to segregate
renunciation and its institutionalized representatives from worldier society and orientations;
they also largely minimize the overall impact of the ideal of renunciation and its representatives
by investing both with very high prestige, on the one hand, but with only limted scope of power,
on the other. This dominant mechanism regulating the attitude toward renunciation and
102

Friedrich-Silber, Virtuosity, Charisma, and Social Order, 7-14.

Eisenstadt, Die Paradoxie von Zivilisationen mit auerweltlichen Orientierungen. berlegungen zu Max Webers
Studie ber Hinduismus und Buddhismus, 336.

103

33

renouncers in such countries a mechanism which segregates between virtuosi and laymen
(but does not disconnect them) can be re-read in terms of surrogate victim mechanism.104
This is one of the most remarkable examples of how the ultimate in world-renunciation and
the ultimate in worldly involvement are both antithetical and intimately connected in Buddhist
thought. Doctrinal Buddhism takes great pains to provide for a specific model of relationship
between virtuoso and layman. This cultural-symbolic coping mechanism explaining why
radical virtuosi have remained confined to a marginal and ambiguous position in Theravda
societies can be interpreted in the light of Girardian mechanism of reconcilatory victim.
Buddhist radical world-renouncers outdoing the tamed virtuosity of organized monkhood
have been found to be in an ambiguous position. Buddhist radical forest world-renouncer can
inspire suspicion and disapproval as well as the greatest awe. They are the true representative
of the ideal of Buddhist forest world-renunciation in its strictest sense, and their very existence
reinforces the credibility of the Buddhist ideolological system as a whole. Girards fundamental
insights into the founding mechanism of human culture helps us understand the mechanisms
which evolved in Theravda Buddhist societies in order to cope with the other-worldliness of
their own ideals. The (Theravada) Buddhist radical world-renouncer, while representing ideals
of the utmost centrality in his society, has achieved only a marginal position and minimal
influence. Factors of both an institutional and symbolic nature have been brought out to explain
the weakness and ambiguity of his social position.105
Much ambiguities of Buddhist logics needs to be understood as related to the social
anthropological ambiguity and liminality of forest Buddhas. These logical contradictions and
ambiguities can be best explained in the sense of the civilizing and differentiating role of the
scapegoat mechanism and generative murders in Buddhist cultural system.
The relation that evolved between world-renouncer and householder, as Weber sees it, is
one of the magical anthropololatry: the layman either worships the virtuoso himself directly,
as a saint, or buys the virtuosos blessings or magical powers in order to promote his own
mundane interests or religious salvation. The world-renouncing asceticism in Buddhism and
Jainism is contemplative-orgiastic in character, in Webers view, and is different from
activist-ascetic asceticism of which Protestantism, and more specifically Calvinism, is taken
as the prototype. Even when acting as religious adviser, Buddhist world-renouncers influence
lies not in the sphere of ethics, but rather and in Webers frame, merely in that of ritual. The
bulk of Webers writing on the subject is concerned with inner-worldly asceticism and its farreaching implications for Western rationalization and modernization. 106 This Weberian
104

Friedrich-Silber, Dissent Through Holiness: The Case of the Radical Renouncer in Theravada Buddhist
Countries, 165-70.
105
Ilana Friedrich-Silber, Dissent Through Holiness: The Case of the Radical Renouncer in Theravda Buddhist
Countries, in S. N. Eisenstadt, Reuven Kahane, David Shulman (eds), Orthodoxy, Heterodoxy and Dissent in India
(Leiden: Walter de Gruypter, 1984), p. 87-104.
106
Friedrich-Silber, Virtuosity, Charisma, and Social Order, 26-33.

34

understanding of Buddhist magical anthropololatry can be re-read in the sense of Girardian

insights into the sacralization of founding victim (Buddhist forest world-renouncer) who
represents and specializes the Dionysian, festive and orgiastic reversal of values.
Thus the ambivalence toward radical world-renouncer and impotency of worldrenouncers radicalism can be best explained by the Girardian hermeneutics of surrogate victim
mechanism. Inherent to the definition of an ideal of radical and sacred world-renouncer is its
transcendental nature, that is, its being beyond and difficult to reach. This might inspire
emulation as well as instill feelings of inadequacy. Some of the complexity of the
psychological processes involved is, according to Silber, conveyed by the contradictory
indications to be found concerning the attitude both monks and laymen have assumed
historically towards those radically world-renouncing and world-negating individuals or
branches of the Sangha trying to better approximate the ideal.107

2.2. nyat, Diffrance and Indiffrenciation Violente

Girards fundamental insights that has received systematic attention within interdisciplinary
cultural theory across the humanities and social sciences provide insights into how the
Buddhis locus of emptiness or absolute nothingness becames the field of Great Affirmation.
This Buddhist emptiness or absolute nothingness symbolizing the Dionysian and festive antistructure can be best understood through the Girardian perspective of differentiating and
founding mechanism of reconcilatory victim rather than Derridean deconstruction. It has been
argued about the decentered unvierse of Zen Buddhism that since Japan has no fixed
structures, deconstruction as such is not possible. By this view, deconstruction has already taken
place in Japan, insofar as Japan has already arrived at a radically decentered or multicentered
reality. As doubted by Derrida himself, it is held by many scholars that deconstruction is already
a basic element in Japanese thought, especially Zen Buddhism. Indeed, some scholars have
argued that the nonsubstantialist and uncentered worldview of Mahayana Buddhism in
general and radically acentric Zen Buddhism in particular can best be interpreted through
Derridas postmodern vision of a dislocated reality devoid of all fixed centeres. But Derrida
himself doubts that deconstructive elements was already present in Zen Buddhist modes of
thought, and asserts that there are structures in Japan which still require criticial decentering.
The Buddhist logic of nyat, Odin argues, is in fact a differential logic which is itself
structurally isomorphic with Derridas logic of diffrance. The diffrance of Derrida, like the
nyat of Buddhism, is said to represent a critical deconstruction of the principle of self-

107

Friedrich-Silber, Dissent Through Holiness: The Case of the Radical Renouncer in Theravada Buddhist
Countries, 182.

35

identity, that is, what in Buddhist discourse takes the form of deconstituting all substantialist
modes of own-being, or self-existence.

108

As we have already seen, the nyat of Buddhism means a sacrificial destruction of the
world-renouncers self-identity. Buddhist discourse representing the thought or logic of forest
Buddhas takes the form of deconstituting all substantialist modes of own-being, or selfexistence and of undifferentiating all differentiated system. The nonsubstantialist, acentric and
uncentered worldview of Buddhism could be viewed against the backdrop of the effacement
of traces of founding violence. Buddhist place of nothingness symbolizes the dark place of
world-renouncers sacrificial death. Buddhist logic of devoidness seems to hide the mystified
logic of violent expulsion and radical elimination.
Upon closer examination, Buddhist logic of nyat turns out to be a Buddhist homeless
world-renouncers logic. This sacred and anti-structural logic nyat is violently
undifferentiating logic which is structurally comparable with Girards logic of indiffrenciation
violente. nyat of self-emptying and ontologically empty world-renouncer represents a critical
deconstruction of the principle of world-renouncers self-identity, that is, what in Buddhist
discourse takes the form of deconstituting all substantialist modes of world-renouncers ownbeing, or self-existence. The seemingly deconstructive non-substantial mode of thought and
emptiness, as I have argued elsewhere, represents the world-negating logic of nonsubstantial
and empty world-renouncer in his ritual and therefore the civil death.109
Girards insights into the differentiating and founding mechanism of surrogate victim sheds
new light on the violent paradox of Buddhist culture based on world-renouncing orientation.
Paradoxically, world-renouncers locus of emptiness or absolute nothingness becomes the field
of Great Affirmation and the locus of total and absolute affirmation of world order. In
contemporary Japanese philosophy the differential logic of acentric Zen Buddhism and its
deconstructive strategy of critical decentering has itself been fully appropriated by Nishida
Kitar and the Kyoto school. It has been argued that Nishidas paradoxical logic of soku/hi or
is and yet is not is structurally isomorphic with Derridas deconstructive logic of diffrance,
which is described as operating through the adversative edge of presence and absence in the
play of textual significations. By this view, both Derrids logic of diffrance and Nishidas logic
of soku/hi are, for Odin, cross-cultural variants of the paradoxical or agnostic paradigm of
articulation. Nishitani Keiji fully incorporates the Zen Buddhist paradoxical soku/hi or is
and yet is not mode of discourse along with Nishida Kitars differential logic of the selfidentity of absolute contradictions. The major problematic raised by Nishitani in this work is
the overcoming of modern nihilism as described by Nietzsche. According to Nishitani, nihility
or relative nothingness can only be overcome by converting to true emptiness or absolute
108

Steve Odin, Derrida and the Decentered Universe, in Charles Wei-hsn Fu, Steven Heine, Japan in Traditional
and Postmodern Perspectives (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1995), 3-4, 7.
109
Patrick Olivelle, The rama System. The History and Hermeneutics of a Religious Institution (New York,
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 207.

36

nothingness (zettai mu) as described by Zen Buddhism. For Nishitani, the locus of absolute
nothingness is to be comprehended as an infinite openness devoid of all fixed metaphysical
centers. The smashing of all metaphysical centers with Nietzsches sledgehammer of Eternal
Recurrence, for Nishitani, culminates in the negation of both the transcendent God of
theocentrism and the individual self of egocentrism. However, the negation of does not result in
the nihilism of relative nothingness since all things are affirmed exactly as they are in their
positive suchness on the field of absolute nothingness. Hence, following the direction of
Nietzches positive nihilism or trans-nihilism, Nishitani deconstructs all substantial
metaphysical centers in order to arrive at a standpoint of complete affirmation. Indeed, using
Nietzschean terms Nishitani calls emptiness or absolute nothingness the field of Great
Affirmation where we can say Yes to all things. For this reason Nishitani regards the negation
of all transcendent and interior centers as well as the total affirmation of life in the Innocence
of Becoming depicted by Nietzsches vision of Eternal Recurrence.

110

Seen from a Girardian viewpoint, Zen Buddhist paradoxical soku/hi or is and yet is not
mode of discourse along with Nishida Kitars so-called differential logic of the self-identity
of absolute contradictions represents sacred anti-logic of forest world-renouncer. Paradoxical
logic of the self-identity of absolute contradictions seems to stem from the anthropological
liminality, ambiguity and ambivalence of forest Buddhas. Paradoxical logic of soku-hi violating
the normal logic means a violently undifferentiating logic or a logical undifferentiation
specialized by world-renouncer. This paradoxical logic represents the festive, Dionysian antilogic. Nishidas paradoxical logic of soku/hi or is and yet is not is structurally related with
Girardian indiffrenciation violente rather than with Derridas deconstructive logic of diffrance.
Derrida, as Odin rightly points out, is not propounding nihilism since all absolute centers
deconstructed through diffrance are said to reappear as trace, understood as an interplay of
presence and absence or identity and difference.
Through the differentiating mechanism of surrogate victim, world-renouncers emptiness
and nothingness transforms itself into the field of Great Affirmation. All things of Buddhist
world order are (re-)affirmed and (re-)differentiated exactly as they are in their positive
suchness on the field of world-renouncing or world-renouncers absolute nothingness. The
allegedly deconstructive nothingness of Buddhist world-renouncer results in the total and
absolute affirmation of world order. What needs to be deconstructed is the cultural mechanism
of founding victim around world-renouncers sacrificial emptiness and nothingness. In the
founding mechanism, reconciliation is achieved against and around the victim. The
reconcilatory victim represents the group from which he has been excluded.
Through the differentiating logic of the violence and the sacred, all things are affirmed and
redifferentiated exactly as they are in their positive suchness on the field of absolute
nothingness and at the dark locus of absolute nothingness as the locus of the founding victim.
110

Odin, Derrida and the Decentered Universe, 5-7.

37

Buddhist (world-renouncers) thought deconstructs all substantial metaphysical centers and

undifferentiates the differentiated duality in order to arrive at a standpoint of complete, total
affirmation of differentiated system of world order. This is the paradox of Buddhist world order
out of the undifferentiated choas represented by the sacred institution of world-renunciation and
its representative of the reversal of values during festivals, forest Buddhas (Dumont).

3.

Girard and Buddhism

3.1. World-renouncers Renoncement Nirvanesque Total

In the Buddhist texts there are some good lessons about the danger of the (mimetic) envy.
The Dalai Lama also spoke of the negativity of jealousy and envy. According to him, jealousy
and envy are very "negative emotions".111 He also rightly points out the curse and blessing of
mimetic competition in modern society. Girard stressed the importance of renunciation as a way
out of the abyss of mimetic rivalry. He used the paradoxical formulation of the creative
renunciation. At first glance, Girard's emphasis on the (creative) renunciation, especially those
phrases that speak explicitly of a renunciation of the mimetic desire, seems to be close to
Buddhism that sees overcoming of all human suffering in the "extinction of desire". Girard sees
the solution but not in the "denial of life itself," but the "death of arrogant attempt at selfempowerment". Girard has explicitly distanced himself from interpretations of the renunciation
in the sense of the eastern world-flight.112 According to Palaver,113Girard who thinks from a
Christian perspective stands not for the "extinction of all mimetic desire," not a fundamental
departure from the world, but for the "re-orientation of that desire," a goal that does not lead to
violence and rivalry.
Girard merely challenges the romantic illusion of the autonomy of desire, 114 not the
independent self in the ontological sense, that is not illusory. The romantic concept of a
spontaneous desire is illusory.115Against this conceptual confusion Girard has emphasized: "I
am not saying that there is not an autonomous self. I say that the possibilities of an autonomous
self are in some way almost always obscured by the mimetic desire.116 On the basis of
anthropological concept explication, the non-substantiality of the self in Buddhism proves to be
less than purely logical-conceptual concept, rather than the social-anthropological one, namely
111

Dalai Lama, Ratschlge des Herzens ( Zrich: Diogenes Verlag, 2005), 140-2.
Ren Girard, Figuren des Begehrens. Das Selbst und der Andere in der fiktionalen Realitt (Mnster: LIT Verlag.
1999), 314.
113
Wolfgang Palaver, Ren Girards mimetische Theorie. Im Kontext kulturtheoretischer und gesellschaftspolitischer
Fragen( Mnster-Hamburg-London: LIT Verlag, 2003), 280-1.
114
Ren Girard, Je vois Satan tomber comme l'clair ( Paris: Grasset, 1999), 25.
115
James G. Williams (ed), The Girard Reader (New York: The Crossroad Publishing Company, 1996), 3.
116
Ren Girard, Wenn all das beginnt. Ein Gesprch mit Michel Treguer (Mnster: LIT Verlag, 1997), 28.
112

38

world-renouncers logic. The Buddhist doctrine of no-self primarily represents the specific
value of the houseless world-renouncer. Following Dumont, Collins117 has rediscovered the
social anthropological context of world-renouncing non-self-teaching: Developing an analysis
of the Buddhist doctrine of not-self as a soteriological strategy, Collins argue that the denial
of self in fact represents a linguistic taboo; but a taboo which is applied differently by
different Buddhists, according to their position on the continuum from ordinary man to (worldrenouncing) specialist. For ordinary men in village, the doctrine is not a matter of immediate,
literal, and personal concern. This doctrine was a matter of world-renoucer. mong these (world)renouncers were the Buddhist monk who, paradoxically, denied the existence of the self.118
The denial of the personal ego is one of the pillars of the Buddhist doctrine and is one of the
four great truths. But Girard advocates for the fundamental goodness of mimetic desire.119
Without mimetic desire, there would be neither freedom nor humanity. The mimetic desire is
for Girard intrinsically good and an essential aspect of human social life, as, for example, the
imitative learning of language evidently shows. Girard does not negate the individual himself in
the (common-sensical) ontological sense, but only the "excessive individualism", which implies
the total autonomy of individuals in their desire.120 Girard does not advocate the renunciation of
mimetic desire itself:

But as to whether I am advocating renunciation of mimetic desire, yes

and no. Not the renunciation of mimetic desire itself, because what Jesus advocates is mimetic
desireSo the idea that mimetic desire itself is bad makes no sense, says Girard. Buddhism is
for Girard less interested in uncovering scapegoat mechanism: Buddhism is not interested in
doing this at all [uncovering scapegoat mechanism]. And Buddhism advocates getting out of the
world altogether.

121

Girard sees the danger of "total nirvanic renunciation" (renoncement nirvanesque total) in
Buddhism. Girard commented: It seems to me that the nonviolence of Eastern religions is the
search for a position outside of violence, nirvana, etc., at the price of all action. But this search
abandons the world in a way to itself. Not it seems to me that if it were necessary to sum it up in
a formula, it would be a phrase such as absolute detachement in regard to existence.If you
please, I feel myself profoundly greco-biblical-occidental in contrast to this complete
nirvanaesque renunciation (ce renoncement nirvanesque total).122
But the nirvanic renunciation in Buddhism should not be misunderstood as a kind of
nihilism. For the buddhist nirva means the "highest state of self-realization of the Tathgata."
Nirva is the transcendental description of the final state of world-renouncing Buddhas. In the
117

Collins, Selfless Persons: Imagery and Thought in Theravada Buddhism, 12.

Bernard Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights. An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1993), 251.
119
Girard in: Willams 1996. Chapter. 5. The Goodness of Mimetic Desire.
120
Ren Girard, Ich sah den Satan vom Himmel fallen wie einen Blitz. Eine kritische Apologie des Christentums. Aus
dem Franzsischen von Elisabeth Mainberger-Ruh (Mnchen: Hanser, 2002), 31-2, 23.
121
See Williams (ed), The Girard Reader, 63.
122
See also Lefebure, Mimesis, Violence, and Socially Engaged Buddhism: Overture to a Dialogue, 122.
118

39

early buddhist idea of Nirvana, according to Dumoulin, transcendence and negativism

(Transzendenz und Negativismus) are closely connected.123 Buddhist negating expression
(negierende Ausdrucksweise)124 must be explicated in terms of world-negating dharma and
logic of Buddhist world-renouncer. The "preference for the negation" (Vorliebe fr die
Negation) related to the "negative formulations of the experience of transcendence" is a
characteristic of Buddhist spirituality. This negativism (Negativismus) could be found also in
the Buddhist philosophy of Kyoto school.125
Buddhist gnosis, the attainment of Nirva, is of no concern to society - from the worldrenouncers point of view. This radicalism of world-renunciation was reserved for the
world- renouncer.126 Nirva represents sacrificial death of world-renouncing Buddhas and
Bodhisatvas and also means sacrificial exist or (self-)expulsion from the world (order). One
finds a broad tendency across Buddhist traditions to conflate the death of enlightened persons
(world-renouncer) with spiritual attainment, or more precisely, to depict their exit from the
world, not as death at all. In such cases, even the word death is rarely used but is replaced by
some special term indicating an escape from the cycle of rebirth, such as nirva without
remainder or going to the pure land. Alternatively, the disappearance of such individuals
(world-renouncer) may be seen as a skillful means designed to awaken others. In discussing
the impermanence of holy beings, Marpa, Milarepa, and other great teachers in Tibet are said
not that they died, but that, in the end, they all chose to demonstrate that everything is
impermanent.

127

The death is anticipated (vorweggenommen) in the Buddhist enlightenment. There is not

essential difference (Wesensunterschied), but difference in form (Formunterschied) between
death and Buddhist enlightenment. 128 The unity of Buddhist enlightenment and suicide
(Gleichkpfigkeit von Erleuchtung und Suizids ) (as in the case of ritual suicide of three
completely enlightened) has been pointed out.129
But overlooking this sacrificial roots of Buddhist or Buddhist world-renouncers no-self and
devoidness, world-renouncers egolessness was often considered as healing alternative for the
possessive individualism. For example, for Tracy,

the most powerful and attractive (perhas

even fascinans et tremendum ) aspects of the Buddhist analysis of the human dillemma which
appeals to any contemporary Westerner aware of the plague of possessive individualism is the
123

Heinrich Dumoulin, Begegnung mit dem Buddhismus. Eine Einfhrung (Freiburg-Basel-Wien: Verlag Herder,
1978), 57, 59.
124
Hans Wolfgang Schumann, Buddhismus. Stifer, Schulen und Systeme (Olten: Walter, 1976), 103.
125
Dumoulin, Begegnung mit dem Buddhismus. Eine Einfhrung, 112-3.
126
Gombrich, Theravda Buddhism : A Social History from Ancient Benares to Modern Colombo, 76.
127
Jacqueline I. Stone, Death, in Donald S. Lopez, Critical Terms for the Study of Buddhism (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2005), 59.
128
Dieter Schlingloff, Die Religion des Buddhismus. I. Der Heilsweg des Mnchtums (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1962), 114.
129
Christoph Kleine, Sterben fr den Buddha, Sterben wie der Buddha. Zu Praxis und Begrndung ritueller Suizide
im ostasiatischen Buddhismus, in Zeitschrift fr Religionswissenschaft 11.2 (2003), 17-9.

40

Buddhist analysis of our inevitable clining to the ego. For Tracy, the Augustinian understanding
of the self as curvatus in se has certain affinities to the Buddhist insistence on the egos
compulsive clinging to itself. The Christian understanding of the self as capable of being a
true, responsible self only by fidelity to the godspel dialectic of to gain the self, one must lose
the self can be radicalized by the Buddhist notion that only be letting go of the utter unreality
of the ego and its compulsive clinging can we possessive individualists break the law of the
infinite desire of the compulsive ego. To cease clinging is to cease to be an ego. No other
thoughts can match this radicality of the Buddhist move. Not even the classical Christian
dialectic of losing the self in order to gain a true self, for Tracy, can match the Buddhist analysis
of the terror of transience caused by the compulsive clinging of the ego. As the sense of the
transcience of Western culture itself becomes heightened in some post-modern notions of the
radical undecidability of all our texts and traditions and the illusory foundational beliefs in
self-presence in modern subjectivity from Descartes thorugh Husserl, the Buddhist analysis of
our cultural situation of possessive individualism as a situation of compulsive clinging in
the face of the terror of transcience , in Tracys view, cannot but increase its appeal to all
post-modern Westerners. It is little wonder that Buddhism was a Western religious option for
many sensitive minds and spirits alive to the peculiarly post-modern Western sense of radical
transcience.130
Buddhist letting go of the utter unreality of the world-renouncers ego and its compulsive
clinging can be read as the effacement of traces of violent expulsion of world-renouncer from
world order. Thus Buddhist notion of letting go represents the very specific and tragic existence
of egoless, empty and homeless world-renouncer rather than human dillemma and existence in
general. The mystified and hidden mechanism of the reconciliatory victim could be detected in
this radicality of the Buddhist letting go of world-renouncing Buddhas.

3.2. World-Renouncer as a Living Dead

There are two Buddhism, namely Karmic Buddhism of worldly householder and Nirvanic
Buddhism of Buddhist forest world-renouncer. Social anthropological dichotomy between
worldly Buddhist householder in viallge and forest world-renouncer had led scholars such as
Melford Spiro to distinguish between a Karmic Buddhism and Nirvanic Buddhism.131
World-renouncers nirva or samdhi means his sacrificial death and should be sacrificially
understood. The (world-renuncing) arhants anticipate their deaths and die in extraordinary
130

Tracy, Dialogue With the Other: The Inter-Religious Dialogue, 77-8.

Melford E. Spiro, Buddhism and Society: A Great Tradition and its Burmese Vicissitudes (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1982).
131

41

ways. Repeating the well-known story, Fa-hsien reports that nanda, for example, in the
process of crossing a river, entered into the samdhi called the brilliancy of flame, which
consumed his body, and entered into nirvna in the very midst of the river. Suicide figures in
some legends of the passing of arhants, as in the case of a forest renunciant who, near a
certain mountain cave, spends his time walking forward and backward, meditating on the
suffering of his life. He determines to commit suicide as a way to root out the three poisons, and,
setting about the work of cutting his own throat, he progressively attains the stages of a oncereturner, a nonreturner, and an arhant and enters nirvna.132
In his Sacrificial Death and the Necrophagous Ascetic, Jonathan Parry claims that the term
samdhi refers to world-renouncers tomb as well as to his condition within it. World-renouncer
takes samdhi, and enters into a perpetual cataleptic condition of suspended animation of
deep meditation. As a result of his sdhan an Aghori (radical world-renouncer) does not die.
He realises the state of non-duality. His body is arranged (if necessary by breaking the spine)
in a meditational posture (known as padman), sitting cross-legged with his upturned palms
resting on his knees. He is then placed in a box which in Benares- is buried in the grounds of
Kina Rams rama (and which is everywhere oriented towards the north).133 Girards mimetic
insights into the differentiating mechanism of the founding victim can shed new light on the
sacrificial death of the necrophagous world-renouncer. Thus meditative state of samdhi
should be understood against the contextual background of the sacrificial death of the
necrophagous radical world-renouncer. This specialists of the violent sacred as the civilizing
victim absorbs the death and contains the festive choas in his liminal and initiatory life.
Banaras contains many small neighborhood shrines which are said to be the samdhis
(tombs) of (world-renouncing) ascetics or guru figures. These are attended, worshiped, and
petitioned much like other local shrines of the deified dead. The range of usage of the term
samdhi helps convey something of the perception of the presence of an entombed ascetic.For
instance, it happens on occasion that a particular yogi will announce his intention to take
samdhi for a specified number of days in a carefully prepared, airless tomb. The yogi
theoretically utilizes his yogic skill to drastically retard bodily functions, obviating the need for
sustenance and air for the duration of the entombment. The body will appear cold and lifeless,
yet the germ of life remains in the highest cakra at the top of the skull. This is a dramatic
example of the yogic meditation which eventually leads to the attainment of samdhi, in this
case the ultimate goal or stage of spiritual attainment after which the being of the yogi is
permanently transmuted or transformed.

134

132

Reginald A. Ray, Buddhist Saints in India. A Study in Buddhist Values & Orientations (New York/Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1994), 189.
133
Jonathan Parry, Sacrificial Death and the Necrophagous Ascetic, in Death and the Regeneration of Life, eds.
Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 96-7.
134
Diane M. Coccari, The Bir Babas of Banaras and the Deified Dead, in Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees:
Essays on the Gods of Popular Hinduism, ed. Alf Hiltebeitel (New Delhi: Manohar, 1989) p. 252.

42

The Buddhist theory of no-self, as Paul Mus put it, is not a moment of pure thought, but a
moment of the thought of India.135 We must put Buddhist concept of nothingness and no-self
back into the original and generative context of the forest world-renunciation. Originally the noself theory in Buddhism was the very specific concept concept of world-renouncing bhiku.
Originally, the noble eight-fold path was supposed to be trodden by world-renouncer alone, the
laymans practice being restricted to alms-giving, and the like. In the course of time, however,
this simple dichotomy became blurred.

This world-renouncing path does not refer to all

Buddhists but only those who are engaged actively on a Buddhist specialists life, which
includes the practice of meditation. Thus it concerns that elite group of monks who are on the
path in the restricted sense of having nirva as their immediate aim. 136 The destruction of
desire belongs to the world-renouncing homelessness. For Brahmanism, the life of the
householder was the very foundation of society, the pivot on which everything turns. In contrast
to the importance of desire in the life householder, the desirelessness is required for the worldrenouncer in his homelessness. Despite the devotional potential of the renunciatory
desirelessness and detachment for the "emotional hygiene," 137 the social anthropological
complexity around the world-renouncer should not be neglected.
Nirva as annihilation of the passions was first and primarily the final state of the Buddhist
"saints", less the universal human condition of the man-in-the-world: "The first is the real
nirva, it is the state of the saints, in which all the passions are finally destroyed and the
several years continues to live through in this way in order to exhaust the remaining reward of
his previous actions The second is achieved at the death of the saints. "138 The social
anthropological specification of nirva in the sense of "state of the saints" allowed it to prevent
a nihilistic or pessimistic misunderstanding of Buddhism.
Girard139 argues that the aim of experience in the great oriental religions is to allow the
individual to escape completely from the world and its cycles of violence by an absolute
renunciation of all worldly concerns, a kind of living death "The absolute renunciation" in
Girard's assessment must be understood in a nuanced fashion. The world-renunciation must not
be rashly generalized in terms of the general human pessimism and nihilism. Girard's critical
remark about the Buddhist "absolute denial" and "a kind of living death" can be accepted less in

135

Paul Mus, Barabudur - Esquisse D'Une Histoire Du Bouddhisme Fondee Sur la Critique Archeologique Des
Textes (Hanoi: Imprimerie d'Extreme Orient, 1935), 184.
136
Collins, Selfless Persons: Imagery and Thought in Theravada Buddhism, 71, 89, 91.
137
Peter Sloterdijk, Erwachen im Reich der Eifersucht. Notiz zu Ren Girards anthropologischer Sendung, in Ren
Girard, Ich sah den Satan vom Himmel fallen wie einen Blitz. Eine kritische Apologie des Christentums (Mnchen:
Carl Hanser Verlag, 2002).
138
Andr Bareau, Der indische Buddhismus, in Die Religionen Indiens: III Buddhismus-JinismusPrimitivvlker,
ed. Andr Bareau, Walther Schubring and Christoph von Frer-Haimendorp (Stuttgart u.a.: W. Kohlhammer, 1964)
(Die Religionen der Menschheit, 13), 54.
139
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 400.

43

the sense of universal human condition in Buddhism, but rather only in the specific context of
the Buddhist world-renunciation.
By comprehending the "dialogue" between world-renunciation and world order (Dumont),
the decontextualized and universally generalized comprehension of world-renouncers nirvanic
Buddhism in the sense of Western phenomenological existentialism needs to be critically
examined. I attempt to re-specify Buddhist emptiness within the sacrificial context of worldrenunciation. Like ascetics of other orders, the Aghori (the radical world-renouncer) aspires to
die to the phenomenal world, to undergo the death that conquers death and to exist on earth as
an exemplar of the living dead. The doctrine that the essence of all things is the same may
clearly be taken to imply a radical devaluation of the caste hierarchy, since from this point of
view there is no fundamental difference between the Untouchable and the Brahman.140 The
radical world-renouncer was like a religious zombi.

141

A close reading of seemingly deconstructive Buddhist negation, emptiness and nothingness

reveals the strong sacrificial context of world-renouncers self-destruction. The point of nyat
is said to deconstruct the self-existence/self-presence of things. nyat, like diffrance, is
said to be permanently under erasure and denied any semantic or conceptual stability. It has
been argued that Buddhist philosophy has been preoccupied with refuting any tendency to
postulate a transcendental-signfied, including any hyperessentialism. For Ngrjuna, Loy
argues, nyat aims at the exhaustion of all theories and view. The purpose of nyat is to
help us let go of our concepts, in which case we must let go of the concept of nyat as well.
For Loy, what is interesting about Derridas type of deconstruction, from a Buddhist point of
view, is that it is logocentric. Derridas approach, Loy argues, is still logocentric, for what needs
to be deconstructed is not just language but the world we live in and the way we live in it.
Derridas freedom, according to Loy, is too much a textual freedom, that it is overly
preoccupied with language because it seeks liberation through and in language in other words,
that it is logocentric. But Buddhist philosophy attempted to work out the implications of certain
meditative experiences and could be understood as a philosophical transcendentalization
of certain meditative experiences.

142

This Buddhist let go could be reread as an effacement or sublimation of the violent

expulsion of the world-renouncer. Buddhist world-renouncers yogic philosophy as a kind of
non-philosophy or anti-philosophy aim at the exhaustion of all theories and view and has been
preoccupied with refuting any tendency to postulate a transcendental-signfied. Worldrenouncers sacrificial nyat is permanently under erasure. World-renouncers dharma,
nyat, is yogic anti-logic situated within the context of ritual world-renunciation as a
140

Parry, Sacrificial Death and the Necrophagous Ascetic, 97-8.

Thomas Mooren, Die Vertauschten Schdel. Tod und Sterben in Naturreligionen, Hinduismus und Christentum
(Dsseldorf : Patmos Verlag, 1995), 92.
142
David Loy, The Deconstruction of Buddhism, in Derrida and Negative Theology, eds. Harold G. Coward, Toby
Foshay, Jacques Derrida (New York: State University of New York Press, 1992), 227-39.
141

44

Dionysian anti-structure rather than deconstructive in the sense of Western still logocentric
deconstructionism. The point of nyat is to destruct the self-existence/self-presence of worldrenouncer.
What needs to be deconstructed is the founding paradox of violent sacred around or against
self-emptying and empty world-renouncer as the reconcilatory victim. World-renouncers
nyat is anti-logical and represents Girardian indiffrenciation violente. Derridas diffrance
is still logocentric and is not yogic concept like nyat. The seemingly deconstructive
nyat could be described as a philosophical transcendentalization of world-renouncers
certain yogic-meditative experiences. The purpose of nyat is to help world-renouncer let go
of worldlly concepts. It is important to recognize that nyat is the homeless, desireless and
egoless world-renouncers logic and dharma and is related to the his sacrificial death. What
needs to be deconstructed is the mystified textual mechanism of founding victim around this
nyat of liminal world-renouncer.
As iek puts it, what the Western Buddhism is not ready to accept is thus that the ultimate
victim of the journey into ones self is this self itself. 143 Buddhist concept of (worldrenouncers) no-self means a sacrificial concept.

3.3. Christ and Polytheistic Plurality of Buddhas

Mimetic model of explanation of the transaction between world order (differentiation)
and world-renunciation (undifferentiation) requires not only the social anthropological rereading of the dialogue between worldly householder and the homeless world-renouncer, but
also the historical-critical studies of Buddhism. An overly superficial correlation between
Girard and kyamuni Buddha suffers from the apparent lack of historical-critical
understanding of kyamuni Buddha. For example, Lefebure asserts that

both Girard and

kyamuni Buddha, as portrayed in the Pli canon, identify a deep-seated illusion concerning
the self as the cause of much unnecessary human misery.144 Girard's theory of culture is
committed to the Enlightenments critic of society and religion145 and seems to have little to do
with the very specific world-renouncing and yogic idea of the non-substantiality.

143

Slavoj iek, The Thrilling Romance of Orthodoxy in Theology and the Political: The New Debate, ed.
Creston Davis, John Milbank, Slavoj iek (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2005), 56.
144
Leo D. Lefebure, Buddhism and Mimetic Theory: A Response to Christopher Ives, in Contagion: Journal of
Violence, Mimesis, and Culture. Volume 9 (Spring 2002), 178.
145
Edmund Arens, Dramatische Erlsungslehre aus der Perspektive einer theologischen Handlungstheorie, in ed.
Jzef Niewiadomski und Wolfgang Palaver, eds, Dramatische Erlsungslehre. Ein Symposion (Innsbruck, Austria:
Tyrolia-Verlag, 1992), 171.

45

Unlike Jesus, Buddha has not even considered as a unique historical phenomenon.146
Strictly speaking, kyamuni Buddha is not as the great founder figure in the center of religious
worship.147In the real-existing Asian Buddhism, the historical Buddha himself is rather behind
another Buddha, the Buddha of immeasurable light (Amitbha ).148 kyamuni is not so central
in Asian Buddhism. It is a "curious fact" that the figure of the religious founder Gautama
kyamuni in some Mahyna sects faded so completely into the background and was replaced
by the mythical Buddhas, Amitbha, Vairocana and so on.149

We must pay attention to the

Buddhist notion of plurality of Buddhas (Pluralitt der Buddhas) and relativization of

historical Buddha Gautama in his Idealbiographie. The number of Buddhas are larger than the
sand in the River Ganges.150
Many Buddhas of different times and places are named in Buddhist literature. Moreover,
anyone who attains release (moka, nirva) from this world of recurring rebirths(sasra) can
be called in some contexts at least a Buddha. Buddhas, then, are potentially as innumerable
as the sands of the River Ganges. The emphasis on types discloses a fundamental structure
in the way Indian Buddhism understands its saints: one attains sainthood through the process of
divesting oneself of the personal and invididual.151

kyamuni Buddha is the youngest teacher in the "infinite number of Buddhas."152 Unlike
Christianity and Islam, the historicity of a unique founding figure is not intrinsic to the Buddhist
message: all Buddhas are, in this sense, the same and interchangeable, in that they rediscover
the same truth. The idea of a plurality of Buddhas is common, and there would seem, as
Collins153 has rightly pointed out, to be no logical space anywhere in Buddhist thought for a
doctrine of the uniqueness or finality of Gotamas revelation in the Christian or Islamic sense.
We must take into consideration not only the "plurality of the Buddhas," but also
"relativization of the historical Buddha Gautama" in its "ideal biography": A kind of "ideal
biography" for the life and work of each Buddha based on the vita of the primordial Buddha
Vipasyin is shown. In this regard, a "relativity of the historical Gautama Buddha" deserves to be
146

Heinz Bechert, Mythologie der singhalesischen Volksreligion, in Gtter und Mythen des indischen
Subkontinents. Wrterbuch der Mythologie. Erste Abteilung Die Alten Kulturvlker. Band V Gtter und Mythen des
indischen Subkontinents, ed. Hans Wilhelm Haussig (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, 1984), 418.
147
Heinrich Dumoulin, Geschichte des Zen-Buddhismus. Band I. Indien und China (Bern-Mnchen: Francke Verlag,
1985), 20.
148
Kng, Eine christliche Antwort, 600.
149
Helmut V. Glasenapp, Buddhismus und Gottesidee. Die buddhistischen Lehren von den berweltlichen Wesen und
Mchten und ihre religionsgeschichtlichen Parallelen ( Wiesbaden:Franz Steiner Verlag, 1954), 96.
150
Hans-Joachim Klimkeit, "Die Heilsgestalten des Buddhismus", in: Heinz Bechert u.a.: Der Buddhismus I. Der
indische Buddhismus und seine Verzweigungen(Die Religionen der Menschheit, 24.1) (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2000),
235, 257.
151
Ray, Buddhist Saints in India. A Study in Buddhist Values & Orientations, 6.
152
Gombrich, Der Theravada-Buddhismus: Vom alten Indien bis zum modernen Sri Lanka, 11.
153
Steven Collins, Problems with Pacceka-Buddhas, Review Article of Martin G. Wiltshire, Ascetic Figures
before and in Early Buddhism: the Emergence of Gautama as the Buddha, Religion and Reason 30, Berlin, New York,
Mouton de Gruyter, 1990, in Religion, vol. 22 (1992), 274.

46

mentioned. He is not unique, but "is a part of chain of preceding Buddhas," whose life is quite
similar to his and their messages are identical to his. The places of birth, enlightenment, first
sermon was the same to all the Buddhas.154
Multiplicity of Buddhas has to be noted. Stories of the Buddhas former births, called
jtakas, became a major genre of Buddhist literaturen. The former Buddhas are less interesting,
for the biography of every Buddha follows much the same pattern. The series of former
Buddhas must stretch back to infinity. The line of births culminating in Gotama Buddha is
ended, but the line of Buddhas strechtes into the infinite future.155 The life career of the Buddha
kyamuni is a" biographical stereotype that applies, with minor differences, to Buddhas that
preceded it and to those who will follow him. 156 So the life of the Buddha, his worldrenunciation may seem to be the unconventional act of a creative personality, and yet this life
career moves just "in long prescribed and defined ways."157
In the case of Christianity, as Ray puts it, a founder arrives who, while fulfilling the past,
also to a large extent presents a dramatic and qualitative innovation over what came before. By
contrast, in Indian Buddhism, we would appear to have a preexisting tradition that is accepted as
legitimate and is simply given less or more distinctive shape by kyamuni Buddha in his time.
It, for Ray, is incorrect to say that Jesus Christ is a prophet like other prophets or a saviour like
other saviours, whereas it is quite appropriate to say that Buddha kyamuni is like, indeed is
identical to, other Buddhas. This represents a diminishing of the figure of Buddha kyamuni in
terms of his uniqueness and individual creativity, a develaution of the historical Buddha, in
favor of other enlightened ones.158
There is the idea of a chronological series of previous Buddhas in Buddhism. Quite early,
Gautama is perceived as one of several Buddhas in a series that began in the distant past. In the
early canonical literature, the series of previous Buddhas sometimes appears as a practically
anonymous group, deriving probably from the recognition that Gautama could not have been
alone in achieving enlightenment. The most important early text on previous Buddhas is the
Mahvadna Sutta, which refers to six Buddhas who had appeared prior to Gautama. This text
implicitly contains the earliest coordinated biography of the Buddha, for it describes the pattern
to which the lives of all Buddhas conform. There are also celestial and cosmic Buddhas. The
recognition that there could be other Buddhas in other world systems described in Buddhist
cosmology builds on implications already present in the idea of past and future Buddhas. Like
the first Buddhas of the past, the first Buddhas associated with other worlds are largely

154

Klimkeit, "Die Heilsgestalten des Buddhismus", 235.

Richard F. Gombrich, Theravda Buddhism. A social history from ancient Benares to modern Colombo. 1988.
2001. London and New York, p. 121.
156
tienne Lamotte, Der Buddha, Seine Lehre und Seine Gemeinde, in Der Buddhismus. Geschichte und
Gegenwart,ed. H. Bechert und R. Gombrich (Mnchen: C.H.Beck, 1984), 36.
157
Schlingloff, Die Religion des Buddhismus. I. Der Heilsweg des Mnchtums, 115.
158
Ray, Buddhist Saints in India. A Study in Buddhist Values & Orientations, 240, n. 72.
155

47

anonymous, appearing in groups to celebrate the teaching of the Buddha Gautama. The
traditions that have focused attention on these Buddhas have inevitably deemphasized the
importance of Gautama Buddha by removing his singularity in human experience and by
contrasting him with more powerful Buddhas who could make their assistance and influence
immediately and directly available.

159

Buddha kyamuni may be considered as a unique individual who gave birth to a new
religion and whose creativitiy is more or less unprecedented either before or after his great
achievement. This view has, in fact, according to Ray, been the one generally taken by modern
scholars. However, this approach, though valid in itself, not infrequently leaves aside the
important question of the extent to which the figure of Buddha kyamuni reflects a more
general paradigm. His life exhibits a paradigm of sainthood. (Forest) Buddha presents
himself as the paradigmatic Buddhist saint.160
Almond has rightly illuminated the thematics of The Buddha from myth to history in the
western creation of Buddhism.. The Buddha was accorded virtually universal admiration
throughout the Victorian period. Less admirable for many Victorians was the mythology with
which accounts of the life of the Buddha abound.

In the Western imagination, Buddhism was

reified as a textual object. A crucial product of this process of the textualization of Buddhism
was the emergence of the historical Buddha. By the middle of the Victorian period, the Buddha
had emerged from the wings of myth and entered the historical stage. No longer identified
with the ancient gods, distinct from the Hindu account of him, and his mythical predecessors,
the Buddha was a human figure one to be compared not with the gods but with other historical
personalities such as Jesus, Mohammed, or Luther, and one to be interpreted in the light of the
Victorian ideal of humanity.161
Largely urbanized elites throughout the Buddhist world have sought to demythologize the
Buddha biography, deleting miraculous elements of the Buddhas life and replacing them with
an image of the founder as a teacher of a rationalistic ethical system or a scientific system of
meditation or as a social reformer committed to the cause of democracy, socialism, or
egalitarianism.162 One trend within Western acccounts of Buddhism worth noting was the
tendency in the mid-nineteenth ceuntry to portray the Buddha as an Indian version of Martin
Luther. Such an approach represents precisely the tendency to represent Asian religions
mimetically in the image of Western Christianity. Often associated with the Lutheran
characterization of Gautama, according to King, was a romantic vision of the Buddha as a
social and religious reformer, reacting against the metaphysical, ritualistic and social excesses of
159

Frank E. Reynolds and Charles Hallisey, The Buddha, in Buddhism and Asian History, ed. Joseph M. Kitagawa
and Mark D. Cummings (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 40-3.
160
Ray, Buddhist Saints in India. A Study in Buddhist Values & Orientations, 46-7.
161
Philip C. Almond. The British Discovery of Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 4, 45, 5479, 139-40.
162
Reynolds and Hallisey, The Buddha, 38.

48

the Hindu brahmanical priests and thereby initiating a return to the simple and pure origins of
Indian religion.163
According to the Buddhist mythology and legends concerning the Buddhas birth, the
Bodhisattva entered Mys womb in the form of a white elephant with six tusks.164 In later
Buddhist dogmatic, it was interpreted as world law (Weltgesetz) for a Bodhisattva to enter his
mothers womb in the form of this beast. 165 Gautama, having in a previous birth made the
resolution under Dipankara to become a Buddha, was reborn after many births in the Tusita
heaven. There he stayed until he was due for rebirth. When the gods announced that a new
Buddha is to arise, the Bodhisattva made five investigations about the place, time and country of
his birth and about the identity of his father and mother. The Bodhisattva, in the form of a white
elephant, entered the golden mansion, made a rightwise circle three times round queen Mayas
bed, smote her right side, and appeared to enter her womb.166 My died seven days after his
birth. After Buddhas birth, she should not have any sensuous love and therefore must die. This
death of My was understood as universal laws.
Bodhisattvas do, seven days afterwords.

167

His mother died, as the mothers of all

168

Using Girards view on monstrous births of mythology, I attempt to offer some insights into
this Buddhist story. In innumerable episodes of mythical birth, the god copulates with a mortal
woman in order to give birth to a hero. Stories of this kind always involve more than a hint of
violence. Zeus bears down on Semele, the mother of Dionysus, like a beast of prey upon its
victim and in effect strikes her with lightning. Girard maintains that these monstrous
couplings between men, gods and beasts are in close correspondence with the phenomenon of
reciprocal violence and its method of working itself out. The orgasm that appeases the god is
metaphor for collective violence. The virgin birth of Jesus, for Girard, still resorts to the same
code as do the monstrous births of mythology. But precisely because the codes are parallel, we
should be able to understand the message and appreciate what is unique to it what makes it
radically different from the messages of mythology. No relationship of violence, Girard argues,
exists between those who take part in the virgin birth: the Angel, the Virgin and the Almighty.
No one here is playing the role of the mimetic antagonist, in the sense of the enemy twins: no
one becomes the fascinating obstacle that one is tempted to remove or shatter by violence.
Girard asserts that the complete absence of any sexual element has nothing to do with. The fact
that sexuality is not part of the picture corresponds to the absence of the violent mimesis with
163

Richard King, Orientalism and Religion. Postcolonial Theory, India and the Mystic East (London and New
York: Routledge, 1999), 144-6.
164
E. Zrcher, The Buddhist Conquest of China. The Spread and Adaptation of Buddhism in Early Medieval China
(Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2007), 433.
165
Glasenapp, Buddhismus und Gottesidee, 66.
166
S.K. Gupta, Elephant in Indian Art and Mythology (New Delhi:Abhinav Publications, 1983), 31-2.
167
Hans-Joachim Klimkeit, Der Buddha. Leben und Lehre (Stuttgart, Berlin, Kln: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1990),
59.
168
Edward J. Thomas, The Life of Buddha as Legend and History (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1952), 33.

49

which myth acquaints us in the form of rape by the gods. Thus for Girard, the Gospels with its
powerful demystificatory potentials can make use of a mythological code in this account of
the birth of Jesus without being brought down to the level of the clumsy mystification and
mystical naivety. Girard points out the inability of the greatest minds in the modern world
to grasp the difference between the Christian crib at Christamas-time and the bestial
monstrosities of mythological births.169
The Buddhist Scriptures, writes Thomas, have often been consciously or unconsciously
brought into comparison with the writings of the New Testament. The result is extremely
misleading unless the differences as historical records are also realised. The composition of the
Gospels and Epistles is not without problems, but the questions concerning the origination
and growth of the Buddhist Canon are far more complex. In the Dhamma and Vinaya we
possess, not a historical framework containing discourse, as in the case of the Gospels, but
simply discourses and other dogmatic utterances, to which traditions and commentarial legends
have later become attached. This is most clearly seen in the case of the Vinaya, where the whole,
except the statement of each rule, is an accretion of legendary matter. We, according to
Thomas, have nothing, even in the Pli, at all like the real facts of the Gospel history to put in
the place of the Sanskrit legend. One element which is usually found unpaltable to modern
thought is the miraculous; and one way of dealing with it has been simply to suppress the
miraculous features.170
Attention must be paid to the polytheistic plurality of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. The idea of
the Bodhisattvas and the tendency towards the deification of the Bodhisattvas helped in the
growth of an elaborate pantheon.171 So in the last analysis, Buddhism, Faure argues, stems
from a pagan or polytheistic logic. 172

3.4. Sacrificial Violence is Nonviolence (ahis )

Girard has been criticized for not having valued the radical non-violence (ahis) of
Buddhism.173 With the help of social anthropological explication of world-renouncing concepts
and values in Buddhism, however, ahis can be explicated in terms of anthropologically
specific cause of the world-renouncer. Ahis should not be confused with any of the pacifism,

169

Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 220-2.

Thomas, The Life of Buddha as Legend and History, xviii -2.
171
S.B. Dasgupta, An Introduction to Tntric Buddhism (Calcutta: University of Calcutta, 1974), 33.
172
Bernard Faure, Double Exposure: Cutting Across Buddhist and Western Discourses (Standford: Standford
University Press, 2004), 79.
173
Georg Baudler, Gewalt in den Weltreligionen (Darmstadt: Wiss. Buchgesellschaft, 2005), 56.
170

50

animal welfare, nonconformist Christianity, and new age enthusiasms which that expression is
apt to call to mind.174
While acknowledging possible positive potential originated from a decontextualized
understanding of ahis, its original context should not be overlooked. According to Dumont,
ahis is primarily a "matter of world-renouncer, for it represents an article of the program
that it requires all possible things in order to achieve world-renunciation. World-renouncer is
someone who refined ahis to the consequences in the field of nutrition. Buddha did not
prohibit any kind of meat-eating for his man-in-the-world. Buddhist prohibition against meateating was originally limited to the world-renouncer It is sufficient that the animal was not
killed for the (world-renouncing). Ahis is to be read from the standpoint of world-renouncer
s ideal and morality. World-renouncer has its own ideal and morality.

175

In dealing with this

question, the anthropological opposition and dialog between the world-renouncer and the manin-the world should be taken into consideration.
Ahis-precept, according to Shee, was "originally a special precept for forest hermit"
(Sondergebot fr Waldeinsiedler ). Basically, "only a dead man" (world-renouncer) is able to
exercise this truly radical ahis. 176 Only at the price of one's death" ahis become
reality.177 The term ahis and certain unease in the killing of living beings seem to have
appeared in the Veda, where it is concerned with general "ambivalence of the sacrifice."

178

Ahis had originally nothing to do with ethics, but everything to do with a magical-ritualistic
taboo for life."179 It was originally "reward for the inner sacrifice,"

180

which gradually replaces

the Vedic sacrifice in the spirit of someone who has chosen to renounce the world.181
Ahis is, as Dumont has argued, not unknown to our contemporaries, for Gandhi used it as
a political weapon and himself translated the term into English as non-violence. The term
ahim and a certain reluctance about killing any living being, is already apparent in the Veda,
where it may be a question only of the universal ambivalence of the act of sacrifice.
According to Dumont, Ahis

is the reward of the internal sacrifice which tends to replace

Vedic sacrifice for those thinkers who are at that moment renouncers-in-the-making. Buddha
refused to endorse the prohibition on eating meat and fish: it was enough that the animal was
not killed for the monk. In short, the world-renouncer has his own ideal and his own morality,
but he has no tendency to impose it on the men-in-the-world. Generally speaking, whilst ahim
174

James Laidlaw, Riches and Renunciation: Religion, Economy, and Society among the Jains (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1995), 154.
175
Dumont, Gesellschaft in Indien. Die Soziologie des Kastenwesens, 180.
176
Monika Shee, Tapas und Tapasvin in den erzhlenden Partien des Mahbhrata. Studien zur Indologie und
Iranistik Dissertationen 1 (Reinbek: Dr. Inge Wezler Verlag fur oriental istische Fachpublikationen, 1986), 277.
177
Mooren, Die Vertauschten Schdel, 93.
178
Dumont, Gesellschaft in Indien. Die Soziologie des Kastenwesens, 180, n. 32..
179
Peter van der Veer, Gods on Earth: Religious Experience and Identity in Ayodhya (Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1994), 288.
180
Cited in Dumont, Gesellschaft in Indien. Die Soziologie des Kastenwesens, 180, n. 33.
181
Ibid., 179-80.

51

played a reduced part in the monastic discipline of the Buddhists, among the Jains, on the
contrary, it was very important, and closely linked with doctrine. Ahim is above all the doing
of the renouncer as an article in the programme which enjoins him to all possible abstentions in
his behaviour so as to obtain the total detachment. Ahim was originally confined to the
renouncer and became general under the influence of Jainism and Buddhism.182
Ahs promulgates the attempt to internalize the sacrificial violence and make himself the
place of sacrifice.183 It can also be understood in the context of "denial of violence in the vedic
sacrifice."184 The killing of the victim for the purpose of sacrifice is 'not killing.'185 Violence
practiced in the sacrifice is nonviolence.

186

Ahisa can thus be explained as a kind of veiling

and denial of sacrificial violence. Sacrificial violence is nonviolence. Sacrificial violence is

not hisa (violence), i.e. ahis. The idea of sacrificial violence has not disappeared in the old
Upaniads. The Indian society has a number of areas that accepts and legitimizes violence. 187
In this context, the institution of world-renunciation can be seen as a place that accepts,
legitimizes, channels and contains the violence. The Dionysian, festive and undifferentiating
sacred institution of world-renunciation was a "safety valve" for the differentiated system of
world order188 and a kind of the "contained chaos" for the cultural order.189
Therefore, the world-renouncing nonviolence (ahis) needs to be explained as a kind of
interiorized violence in the ambivalent sense of violence-channeling violence. The original
meaning of the ahis within the context of world-renunciation is to be understood less from
the perspective of the pacifist non-violence in modern-Christian sense, but rather in the light of
the highly specific process of the interiorization of sacrificial violence and the denial of
sacrificial violence. A logical progression from the sacrifice of other bodies is sacrificing ones
own body. This may range from penance and discipline to austerities, mortifications, selfmutilation, and ritual suicide. 190 "Violence against himself" in ahis was discussed
recently.191 But violence against himself, against all the passions of the body and mind in the

182

Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications (Chicago: The University of Chicago
Press, 1970), 148-50.
183
Maya Burger, Violence et non-violence, modle et contre-modle dans le contexte de lInde moderne, in
Religions et violences. Sources et interactions, ed. Anand Nayak (Fribourg: Editions Universitaires Fribourg Suisse,
2000), 135.
184
Anand Nayak, Les violences dans lhindouisme, in Religions et violences. Sources et interactions, ed. Anand
Nayak (Fribourg: Editions Universitaires Fribourg Suisse, 2000), 70.
185
Jan C. Heesterman, Das vedische Opfer, in Der Hinduismus als Anfrage an christliche Theologie und
Philosophie, ed. Andreas Bsteh (Mdling: St Gabriel 1997), 49.
186
La violence pratique dans le sacrifice est non-violence (Nayak, Les violences dans lhindouisme, 70).
187
La violence sacrificielle soit non-violence (ibid., 71).
188
Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus. The Caste System and Its Implications. Complete Revised English Edition
(Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), 279.
189
Friedhelm Hardy, The Religious Culture of India. Power, Love and Wisdom (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1994), 553.
190
Dolf Hartsuiker, Sdhus : holy men of India (London : Thames & Hudson, 1993), 18.
191
Baudler, Gewalt in den Weltreligionen, 57.

52

Buddha's life is obvious. Buddha chose an approach to life free from violence for his monks,
opting for the path of ascetics. In this lifestyle, violence is actually directed against himself and
against all the passions of the body and mind.192
The ability of the victimage mechanism to produce the sacred, Girard claims, depends
entirely on the extent to which the mechanism is misinterpreted. The production of the sacred is
necessarily and inversely proportional to the understanding of the mechanisms that produce it.193

4. Forest World Renunciation

4.1. Buddhas as Forest World-renouncers
Much modern and postmodern new misunderstandings concerning the Buddhist nothingness
appears to be related to the forgottenness of the anthopological of world-renouncing and
sacrificial nothingness. Girard criticizes modern thinking "without anthropological foundation":
Because much contemporary thought is still without an anthropological basis, it remains given
to verbal acrobatics that will ultimately prove to be sterile, says Girard.194 According to
McKenna,

195

Girard's mimetic theory of deconstruction of the cultural order offers an

important anthropological support that they can keep them from sliding into mere nihilistic
language games. For me, some new misunderstanding of Buddhism seems to have to do with
the lack of (social) anthropological concept explication. Recently, there is some change from a
"ahistorical and textualized Buddhism" research to anthropological, cultural and social science
research concerning Buddhism. In the last decade or so, Western scholars of Buddhism have
been moving away from such a textually and doctrinally oriented approach to Buddhism.
Prominent among these is the growing recognition of the important contribution that the social
sciences, especially anthropology, have made in understanding religion and Buddhism.196
Locating the essence of Buddhism in certain canonical texts, as King has suggested,
allows the Orientalist to maintain the authority to speak about the true nature of Buddhism,
abstractly conceived. Such ahistorical constructs can then be contrasted with the corrupt and
decaded practices of contemporary Asian Buddhists by a normative appeal to the purity of the
original texts. This radically ahistorical and textualized Buddhism, located in and
administered from the libraries of Europe rather than in Asia, now provided the normative
192

Anand Nayak, Violence dans le bouddhisme, in Religions et violences. Sources et interactions, ed. Anand
Nayak (Fribourg: Editions Universitaires Fribourg Suisse, 2000), 165.
193
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 33-4.
194
Ibid., 64.
195
Andrew J. McKenna, Violence and Difference. Girard, Derrida, and Deconstruction (Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 1992).
196
Peter N. Gregory,. "Is Critical Buddhism Really Critical?" in Jamie Hubbard and Paul Swanson, eds., Pruning the
Bodhi Tree: The Storm over Critical Buddhism (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997), 294.

53

standard by which all particular examples of Buddhism could be both defined and (negatively)
assessed). 197 The new (anthropological )s approach, for example monographs by Faure,
Gombrich, Schopen, Spiro and Tambiah on topics of Buddhism and society, moves away from
the uncontextualized studies of Buddhist philosophy that were characteristic of the field until
the 1980s.198
In spite of still existing idealizing tendency (Verklrungstendenzen) with respect of
Buddhism, the "romantic understanding of Buddhism" is increasingly put into question in recent
decades. Not coincidentally, this was called into question with the turn of the Asian Studies into
"cultural and social science research."199 The anthropological understanding of Buddhism is
increasingly recognized and applied. In a chapter Archaeology and Protestant Presuppositions
in the Study of Indian Buddhism, Schopen argues that an overriding textual orientation was
in place very early in Buddhist studies. Such a precedure has, of course, placed archaeology and
epigraphy is a very awkward position. Textuality overrides actuality. And actuality as
expressed by epigraphical and archaeological material is denied independent validity as a
witness.200 Challenging the popular stereotype that represented the accumulation of merit as the
domain of the layperson while Buddhist monks concerned themselves with more sophisticated
realms of doctrine and meditation, Schopen problematizes many assumptions about the laymonastic distinction by demonstrating that monks and nuns, both the scholastic elites and the
lesse learned, participated actively in a wide range of ritual practices and institutions that have
heretofere been judged popular, from the accumulation and transfer of merit; to the care of
deceased relative. The history of Buddhist monastic architecture, for Schopen, confirms the
active participation of monks in the stupa/relic cult.
Girards mimetic theory allows for an anthropological recontextualization of not only
ancient Greek literature, but also of the Budddhist literature representing the yogic philosophy
and logic of world-renouncer. The anthropological recontextualization of the seemingly purely
formal logic of Buddhist (world-renouncers) emptiness and nonduality needs to be done.
Using a social anthropological re-reading, the "too exclusive concentration on the Nirvana
Buddhism of Meditation and of desire-extinction" (Nirwana-Buddhismus der Meditation und
der Wunschauslschung ), beside which there is also the "Buddhism of desire-satisfaction"
(Buddhismus der Wunschbefriedigung) represented by Buddhist householder, needs to be
critically examined.

201

There are two Buddhisms, namely Nirvana Buddhism of yogic

meditation and of desire-extinction for the forest world-renouncer and (Kammatic) Buddhism of

197

King, Orientalism and Religion. Postcolonial Theory, India and the Mystic East, 146-8.
Alan Cole, Mothers and Sons in Chinese Buddhism (Standford, California Standford University Press, 1998 ), 6.
199
Kollmar-Paulenz and Prohl, Einfhrung: Buddhismus und Gewalt, 146.
200
Gregory Schopen, Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks: Collected Papers on the Archaeology, Epigraphy, and
Texts of Monastic Buddhism in India (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1997), 2,3,7.
201
Hans Kng, Zum christlich-buddhistischen Dialog, in Buddhismus und Christentum. Geschichte, Konfrontation,
Dialog, ed. Michael von Brck and Whalen Lai (Mnchen: C. H. Beck, 1997), 19.
198

54

desire-satisfaction for the Buddhist householder. Buddhism consists of the strict distinction
between the elaborated disciplinary code in great detail ( ethics of Bhiku) and the 'average'
ethics' of the householder.202 The contrast between the ritual code of conduct and ethics of
world-renouncing Bhiku and Buddhist householder is striking. One dramatic index of the
disparate treatment of world-renouncing virtuosi and laymen in the world is the contrast
between the lay ethic, consisting of only 5 precepts, and the elaborate 227 precepts for Buddhist
monks.203
In Prtimoka there are always "meticulous" preoccupation with the question of what to
consume the Bhiku when, how he has to accept clothes, where he lived and how he can make
his relationship with the householder, etc. In contrast to the ethic of the householder, there are a
very large number of rules that affect many aspects of behavior and its transgression required
penance - such as sexual vulgarity of any kind, improper behavior toward other bhikus,
violations of provisions of food and non-violence and violations of the "requirement to stay
away from the life of the householder. "204
Dumont noted that in India there are "two kinds of people": those who live in the world, and
those who renounce the world. He suggested that the "secret of Hinduism" lies in the "dialogue"
between the world-renouncer and man-in-the-world.205 Based on Dumont's analysis, Collins has
worked out the dual structure of opposites and social dichotomy between sasra and nirva,
between householder and bhiku, and between village and jungle in Buddhist thought. The
Vedic ritual texts stress the opposition of grma, village, that is, the domesticated world,
and the world of the jungle, araya.206The hermeneutical key to the understanding of the secret
and paradox of Buddhist culture lies also in comprehending the social anthropological
dichotomy, opposition and dialog between sasra and moka, between village and wilderness ,
life-in-the-world and world-renunciation. The opposition between village and wilderness is
ancient and ubiquitous in Brahmanical thought.207 The immediate goal of lay Buddhists is not
nirva, but rather the accumulation of merit (puya), by which they aspire to happiness in this
life and a good rebirth in the hereafter. Lay Buddhists gain merit through good actions, and
central among these is the making of donations to the monastic sagha.208
The world-renouncer leaves the organised and differentiated space of home and settlement
(village) for homelessness and the formless and undifferentiated wilderness. This is explicit in
the ritual recitation of monk (bhikkhu) ordination to wander forth out of the home into the
202

Tambiah, Max Webers Untersuchung des frhen Buddhismus. Eine Kritik, 222.
Friedrich-Silber, Dissent Through Holiness: The Case of the Radical Renouncer in Theravada Buddhist
Communities, 167-8.
204
Tambiah, Max Webers Untersuchung des frhen Buddhismus. Eine Kritik, 217.
205
Dumont, Gesellschaft in Indien. Die Soziologie des Kastenwesens, 311-2.
206
Jan C. Heesterman, Broken World of Sacrifice: An Essay in Ancient Indian Ritual (Chicago: University of.
Chicago Press, 1993), 29-30.
207
Collins, Selfless Persons: Imagery and Thought in Theravada Buddhism, 63.
208
Ray, Buddhist Saints in India. A Study in Buddhist Values & Orientations, 16.
203

55

homeless state. Forst-dwelling world-renouncer is similar to wild beasts and birds. The
meaning of whole way of world-renouncers life and its processes must be the loss of ones
humanity. When we use the term humanity, we have in mind the invention or creation of
culture and social relationships. These two human attributes are lost in two ways during the life
in the wilderness. After having entered the forest (undomesticated world of the wild), worldrenouncer has no more relationships with the village life and its people, and he gradually
abandons all cultural dimensions and benefits.209
The term wilderness, or araya, specifies any locale outside of the town and viallge, that is,
separated from centers of human habitation and activity. Araya has both a literal and a
symbolic meaning, indicating a place removed from population centers and also a particular
kind of environment that is solitary, uncivilized, and disjunct from human civilization. This
makes the forest frightening to ordinary worldly folk but compelling to those who aspire to
realization.210
Forest monks were disliked because of their homelessness, relative austerity, and even
enthusiasm for their somewhat permanent liminal state on the fringes and interstices of
society. Many tales emphasize the sense of separation, exclusion, and distance when wandering
monks pass through the village on their way to distant forest monasteries or perhaps take up
temporary residence at local cemeteries. In those days villagers had very little contact with the
outside world, and rarely ventured far from the village because of the risks and difficulties in
travelling. There has been the suspicion and fear towards forest world-renouncer, possibly as
some kind of tricksters, or agent provocateur for the state. The villagers and, perhaps most
importantly, the local clergy, perceived the wandering forest monks as a potential threat to the
security and established familiar order of the village with its relatively discrete bounded world.
They were not only feared, but occasionally also despised.211
If one consider the institution of world-renunciation within the socio-anthropological
context, a whole series result from "binary oppositions", as Louis Dumont in his essay "World
Renunciation in Indian Religions has suggested. Dumonts essay World Renunciation in
Indian Religions,212 given as the Frazer lecture at Oxford in 1958, has achieved a considerable
reputation, it inspired, for example, J. C. Heestermans article Brahmin, Ritual and
Renouncer. 213 The world-renunciation leaves the organized space of the house and the
settlement (of the village) and selected (the disorganized) homelessness and "formless
209

Ryokai Shiraishi, Asceticism in Buddhism and Brahmanism : A Comparative Study (Tring, UK : Institute of
Buddhist Studies, 1996), 67-8.
210
Ray, Buddhist Saints in India. A Study in Buddhist Values & Orientations, 45.
211
J. L. Taylor, Forest Monks and the Nation-State: An Anthropological and Historical Study in Northeastern
Thailland (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1993), 122-3.
Social Issues in Southeast Asia. Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1993, p. 122-3.
212
Published in Religion/Politics and History in India: Collected Papers in Indian Sociology (The Hague: Mouton,
1970), 32-60.
213
In Wiener Zeitschrift fr die Kunde Sd-und Ostasiens, VIII(1964), pp. 1-31.

56

wilderness." He has no fire, the symbol and instrument of sacrifice. He may neither produce
nor reproduce, for desire is for the world-renouncer death. He leaves the world of ascribed
statuses, notably caste, for the casteless world.. World-renouncer even tries to abandon
ordinary perceptual and thought processes to attain altered states of consciousness. This world,
which rejected the traditional institutions of society, the Buddha joined when he made the Great
Renunciation.214
Thus the allegedly deconstructive Buddhist (world-renouncers) (world-) negations shoud be
re-read as sacrificial concept of egoless and desireless world-renouncer. Derrida is said to
criticise Western metaphysics as well as early anti-metaphysical philosophies for their failure to
understand the question of the sign. Derridas term the question of the sign might be an
allusion to Heideggers expression the question of Being. Heidegger observed that Western
metaphysics, in determining the meaning of being in terms of presence, has forgotten to ask the
question of Being. Derrida insists, however, that Heidegger and many other earlier critics of
Western metaphysics have failed to ask the question of the sign. For Wang, Derridas diffrance
echoes the Madhyamaka theme of Eight Negations which summarise the notion of the true
sign of all dharmas. Derrida, Wang asserts, coverges with the Mahyna Buddhist philosophers
in postulating the notion of the Same as the ultimate reality of the sign. In Buddhism, the Eight
Negations reject the binary relations of identity and difference, and emphasize the tendency of
the sign to pass over to its other. Thus, binary oppositions such as those between the
masculine and feminine, between life and death, and so on are to be dissolved in this
movement toward the other.

215

Many people have forgotten or failed to ask the important question: whose nothingness ? A
closer look at the Buddhist nothingness reveals that it represents the world-renouncing logic and
dharma of forest Buddhas. Girardian theory on mechnism of reconcilatory victim can make
sense of this Buddhist (world-renouncers) dissolving and violent undifferentiation of binary
differences. Fundamental differences between the masculine and feminine, between life and
death are to be dissolved in the liminal world-renouncer as the founding victim, in order to
reproduce and renew the cultural differences.
This Buddhist sign must be interpreted in terms of the world-renouncing reconcilatory
victim. For Girard, the signifier is the victim. The signified constitutes all actual and potential
meaning the community confers on to the victim and, through its intermediacy, on to all things.
The sign is the reconciliatory victim. The imperative of ritual is therefore, Girard argues,
never separate from the manipulation of signs and their constant multiplication, a process that
generates new possibilities of cultural differentiation and enrichment. The processes that are
related to hunting, the domestication of animals, sexual prohibitions, etc., might all be described
as the manipulation and differentiation of the sign constituted by victimage. Wishing to
214
215

Gombrich, Theravda Buddhism : A Social History from Ancient Benares to Modern Colombo, 49.
Wang, Buddhism and Deconstruction: Towards a Comparative Semiotics, 13-4.

57

continue life under the sign of the reconciliatory victim, men attempt to reproduce and
represent this sign.216
Under the sign of world-renouncing Buddhas and Bodhisattvas as the reconcilatory vitim,
Buddhist texts attempt to reproduce and represent this sign. In the Buddhist (worldrenouncers ) homeless and forest (anti-)logic and dharma of devoidness and undifferentiating
nonduality, we can read and detect the manipulation, multiplication and differentiation of the
sign constituted by victimage mechanism. In his book Violence and Difference. Girard, Derrida,
and Deconstruction, Andrew J. McKenna also argues that the victim is experienced as the
subject of an ambivalent power of which it is the object, the mediator and the sign. The victims
power to fascinate is one with its power to mediate signification. The victim is accordingly the
mana of the system of cultural differences.217

4.2. Village (grma ) and Jungle (araya )

Conze show that there is a difference "between two qualitatively different types of people the 'sacred people' and the ordinary people." Saints and ordinary people live on two different
planes of existence, the worldly and world-renouncing.218 Monks meditate on the four truths,
three features, wrong views, and such issues and seek through yogic exercises for 'mystical
oneness and ultimate redemption. " Lay people and kings seek a favorable rebirth. Rites of the
laity and kings revolve around the relics of the Tathagata and around stupa devotion. The
request cancellation of the renunciation of the world corresponds to the strange world of the
jungle (Aranya). Thus the Buddhist analysis of existence originally represents the generally less
universal condition of human existence in general, but rather the very specific world-renouncing
existence of Buddhist specialists of the sacred.
Monks meditate on the four truths, three features, inverted views, and such issues and seek
for mystical oneness and ultimate redemption through yogic exercises. Lay people and kings
seek a favorable rebirth. Rites of the laity and kings revolve around the relics of worldrenouncing Buddhas and Bodhisattvas and around stpa devotion.
The ritual opposition, dialectic and dialog between village (grma ) and jungle (araya) is
the fundamental part of the Hindu-Buddhist orders. The ancient Vedic opposition between
grma/ araya reflected generally the relationship and reciprocity that exist between the manin-the-world and the stranger, the alienated, independent home-and lonely beggars and homeless

216

Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 103.

McKenna, Violence and Difference. Girard, Derrida, and Deconstruction, 73-5.
218
Edward Conze, Buddhistisches Denken, Drei Phasen buddhistischer Philosophie in Indien (Frankfurt am Main:
Insel Verlag, 1988), 75.
217

58

ascetics.219 Having renounced the world and entered the forest, Gautama will follow the way
of the forest renunciation. From this time forth, he is himself a ramaa, wearing the garb of a
mendicant, begging his food from the laity, and dwelling in the uninhabited forest
(nirjanavana) in no fixed abode.220 In Vedic India, and more generally in brahmanic India,
this dichotomy of village and wilderness is omnipresent. The entirety of the inhabitable world is
divided between grma and araya. Araya, forest, is derived from araa, strange, which is
itself connected to the Indo-European radical al-, ol-, the very same radical that is the source of
the Lain words alius, alter, and ille. The grma is maintained and sustained by institutions that
define the relationship of each individual with every else, with the cosmos, and with oneself.
This norm, which is at once a system of rules and the world order, is dharma.221
These forest saints represent the first Buddhist saints. Classical Buddhism owes so much
to them and the normativeness of this world-renouncing ideal they represented was enduring.
One particular facet of depiction of kyamuni Buddha deserves further comment, namely, his
forest character. Buddha is a saint of the wilderness who, even in his public career, continues
to espouse the practices and values of forest renunciation. 222
The reconcilatory victim are sometimes exiled to the forest, jungle, or desert. There
undifferentiated violence reigns. There is the sacred realm inhabited by beings devoid of those
stable differences, of that fixed status. Wilderness or jungle represent monstrous mixture of
differences.223 The idealistic-idyllic romance of forest (Waldromantik) must be corrected by
a realistic understanding of the Indian wilderness (better jungle) : In the old Indian context, the
wilderness as a place of world-renouncing efforts was always described as locus amoenus.
224

The "realistic portrayal of the inhospitable and sometimes even dangerous wilderness and the

arduous life there" in the original context is not to be overlooked. Buddhist texts reflect a trend
toward movement from the rigorous renunciant ideal, seen here as more ancient and more
authentic, to the less demanding, more comfortable renunciation of town and village. We can
refer to this type of movement from wilderness retreat to village monastery as a process of
monasticization. 225 The religious mind knows that in order to polarize effectively the
malevolent aspects of communal life, the victim must differ from members of the community
but also resemble them.
Wild forst (araya) is not defined in any positive way, but rather as something that is
missing: it is the absence of a village, the empty space delineated by two divergent paths,
219

Joachim Friedrich Sprockhoff, Sanysa - Quellenstudien zur Askese im Hinduismus, Bd. I: Untersuchungen
ber die Samnysa-Upanishads (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1976), 288.
220
Ray, Buddhist Saints in India. A Study in Buddhist Values & Orientations, 49.
221
Charles Malamoud, Cooking the World. Ritual and Thought in Ancient India (Delhi: Oxford University Press,
1996, 75-7.
222
Ray, Buddhist Saints in India. A Study in Buddhist Values & Orientations, viii, 63.
223
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 282.
224
Shee, Tapas und Tapasvin in den erzhlenden Partien des Mahbhrata, 306, n. 387.
225
Ray, Buddhist Saints in India. A Study in Buddhist Values & Orientations, 96, 99.

59

an undifferentiated and unexplicated break in continuity. The wild and undifferentiated

wilderness is also that which lies outside of the differentiated village. Sacred world-renouncer
belongs to this wild chaotic and undifferentiated wildness of forest.226 Thus, Buddhist empty
space of nothingenss, voidness and emptiness should be understood against this background of
social anthropological dichtomy between worldly householder in differentiated village and
world-renouncing yogi in undifferentiated wildness of forest. he liminal life of homeless worldrenouncer should be read sacrificially rather than romantically.
For Girard, the beggar picked by Apollonius recalls the kind of homeless persons whom
Athens and the great Greek cities fed at their expense in order to make use of them as
pharmakoi when the appointed time arrived, that is, collectively to assassinate them

during the

Thargelia and other Dionysian festivals. The beggar stoned displays all the classical features of
the pharmakos, features we see likewise in all the human victims of sacrificial rituals. To avoid
arousing reprisals, the sacrificial community choose social nobodies: the homeless, those
without familty, the disabled and ill, abandoned old people, all those in short who bear the
preferential signs for being selected as victims. These signs or features change hardly at all
from one culture to another.227
There is the correlation between forest monk and the untamed animal world. The secluded
meditator is conterminous with the wild. Both forest monk and wil animal are similarly
situated outside society. Buddhist forest world-renouncer share common boundaries
(conceptually and spatially) with wild animals. Canonical texts with which forest monks are
most familiar are resplendent with the primordial imagery of the forest life; the Buddha was
never at a loss to praise his forest-dwelling pupils. The term for forest (paa) carried cultural
connotations with being wild, and uncivilized. Paa is sometimes linked with a similar word of
Khmer origin, theuan, implying illegality or something illicit. In Thai language there are
obvious discriminatory categories associated with the antonyms paa (forest/remote, wild,
untamed, uncivilized, savage, illicit, and so on) as negative categories, and the Thai word
baan (house, domestic, community, village, familiar, settlement, and so forth) as positive
categories. The nations forests are considered hostile places, not easily controlled, disordered,
remote, and inimical to national security and well-being, in effect the antithesis of the social
and ritual order of civilization. To go to the forest means, in addition to its literal sense, to
defecate or to enter a cemetery. The forest is the domain of wild animals, demons and spirts.
Nor is there any sense of natural beauty in forests. All beauty lies in human settlements. The
cosmological layout of patterned human settlements corresponds to a hieararchy in which
beauty and civilization flows downwards from the towns to the village. In the ancient Indic
Vedas, forests (the aranya) were the sacred gaps situated between centres of human settlement.
Wandering monks were received with some apprehension and hostility, seen as intimidating the
226
227

Malamoud, Cooking the World. Ritual and Thought in Ancient India, 81.
Ren Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 2001), 76-7.

60

secure, circumscriptive familarity of the village. Outsiders generally may be perceived as

potentially dangerous sources of power in contradistinction to their complementary oppposite
insiders which implied saftety. Popular religiosity reinforces this basic binary conception in
an attempt to create a sense of enduring order out of surrounding choas and temporal disorder.
In the forest, outside of the culturally familiar village, is the ever-threatening presence of
malignant powers, wild animals, and strangers- which include wandering monks. Strangers and
forest are of the same potentially hostile category, situated outside the purlieus of the known
world. These are the marginal interstices, the ambiguous boundary zone and as such all
precautions must be taken by villagers to protect themselves from its likely dangers. Similarly a
person who emerges from these patternless places is regarded as polluting.

228

World-renouncer come from the wilds, the forest (skt. araya; p., araa) in the Indian
terminology. As noted earlier, these forest saints represent the first Buddhist saints. Classical
Buddhism owes so much to them. And the normativeness of the ideal they represented was
enduring. Tritique of non-forest ideals are sometimes important parts of expressions of forest
Buddhism.229 In spite of later process of monasticization, forest Buddhism provided the
highest ideal of earliest Buddhism.230 Monastic forest dweller, largely because of his regular
habitat (co-existing with the anomalous wilderness, decay, and death), informal network of
pupils and movement within the fringe of established order, has long been a cause of concern,
ambivalence, and mistrust to the establishment. However, paradoxically the forest monk has
simultaneously been revered not only in Thailand, but throughout the Theravada world. Many
forest teachers have been regarded as national spiritual treasures.

231

4.3. Nirva-Buddhism of Meditation and of Desire-Extinction

Following the socio-anthropological dual structure, the anthropological re-reading of
Buddhist understanding of is divided into two parts. There is the nirva Buddhism of
meditation and of desire-extinction, which is only a world-renouncing monk elite possible and
"Buddhism of desire-satisfaction focused on samsra. 232 First, the Nirvana-Buddhist
meditation and the desire to extinction will be investigated. In his essay "We Are All Buddhists
Now, Eric Gans correctly analyzes the problem of "sacrificial violence against his own desire
": What has made the Buddhist perspective attractive to Westerners since the days of
Schopenhauer is its rejection of desiring individuality. Few in consumer society practice,
228
229
230
231
232

Taylor, Forest Monks and the Nation-State, 239, 247-9.

Ray, Buddhist Saints in India. A Study in Buddhist Values & Orientations, viii.
Ibid., 404.
Taylor, Forest Monks and the Nation-State, 154-5.
Kng, Zum christlich-buddhistischen Dialog, 19.

61

according to Gans, the systematic denial of desire, but many include in their consumption
practices signs of this denial to display to themselves and others. As Gans puts it, the Wests
greater awareness of cultures function in deferring violence has oriented it toward developing
secular alternatives to the sacrificial mode rather than merely turning sacrificial violence inward
against ones own desire.

233

Sometimes, Buddhist meditation practice is proposed as a solution to the scapegoat

mechanism. Lefebure argues that Buddhist meditation practice, even though not based on as
detailed a description of the scapegoat mechanism as Girards mimetic theory, offers very
precise techniques for overcoming the problem. By paying attention to the originally worldrenouncing context of Buddhist meditation, we can nunance his claim that the Buddhist practice
of meditation ist not "fight against lust," but "raising awareness of desire."234 Originally, the
Buddhist meditation was developed by and for world-renouncer. 235
(Meditation) Buddhism emphasized the spiritual and devotional importance of renunciation
in the age of mimetic crisis and envy society. The Dalai Lama has stressed the importance of
compassion and nonviolence: Therefore, the attainment of compassion and mercy is a question
of survival.236 The struggle for the anthropologically informed understanding of Buddhism and
meditation does not mean the depreciation of (psychotherapeutic) potential generated by
meditational Buddhism with its doctrine of the renunciation of desire, especially in an era of
unbridled desire.
The question about the original meaning and context of the specifically Buddhist meditation
must be raised. Gombrich has critically examined the issue of Buddhist meditation as a help for
life in the Protestant Buddhism." The Sinhalese middle-class employs more and more
"meditation as a help for life." A period of imposed silence and tranquility could be an excellent
addition to the diary of agitated businessman. The problematic use of the specifically Buddhist
world-renouncing meditation that is originally by and for world-renouncer can be critically
reflected: "The Buddhist meditation, which was developed by and for world-renouncer,
cultivates the feeling of detachment from the world. People who still lead a family life and
pursue their profession will feel so divided. Earning money will appear as 'greed', the sexual
relationship with spouse as 'passion', "Gombrich noted. Originally Buddhist yogic meditation
was imposed for and on the world-renouncer. 237 Nirvana as extinction of desire was the yogic
final state (der yogische Endzustand) of world-renouncer. 238

233

Eric Gans, We Are All Buddhists Now, Chronicles of Love and Resentment. In
www.anthropoetics.ucla.edu/vw242.htm
234
Lefebure, Mimesis, Violence, and Socially Engaged Buddhism: Overture to a Dialogue, 132.
235
Gombrich, Der Theravada-Buddhismus: Vom alten Indien bis zum modernen Sri Lanka, 210.
236
Dalai Lama, Brcken zur Klarheit. Vortrge zu Naturwissenschaft und Buddhismus. Mit einer Einleitung von C. F.
Von Weizscker (Hamburg : Dharma-Ed., 1995), 59.
237
Gombrich, Der Theravada-Buddhismus: Vom alten Indien bis zum modernen Sri Lanka, 210.
238
Dumoulin, Geschichte des Zen-Buddhismus. Band I. Indien und China, 29.

62

The discourse of desire in Buddhism must be nuanced social anthropologically. Only for the
Buddhist world-renouncer, desire is demonized.239 The Buddhist meditation on the emptiness
can be specified anthropologically. The selflessness as an object of meditation and emptiness as
an object of meditation240 originally represented less general human condition, but rather the
specific existence of world-renouncing specialists of the sacred. Schlingloff has pointed out the
(world-renouncing) awareness of the body parts through the mental fragmentation of the body
as a "means of killing the sensual passion."241 The specific Buddhist "meditation on the
sufferings of cyclic existence"242 needs to be understood not in the modern context of the
phenomenology of religion or philosophy of existence, but in the original context of "Buddhism
as a phenomenology of Indian society. 243
Buddhist emptiness is a sacrificial concept of forest world-renouncer in his homlessness and
desirelessness. The (yogic) experience of nonduality is not the final goal of the sdhana. It is
only a stepping stone and must itself be transcended by an understanding of emptiness that
negates even the intrinsic existence of the nondual mind. The purpose of the emptiness
meditations is said to be to abandon the ordinary idea of self. The emptiness meditations
are sometimes likened to the death of the meditator, as he (yogic world-renouncer) dissolves
his ordinary self into the dharmakya.244 The internal processes of (Tantric) yoga are concerned
with the deliberate simulation of the process of death.

245

Buddhist meditation attempts to

simulate world-renouncers death in his meditative initation and to anticipate death

process.246
Emptiness is sacrificial logic and dharma of homeless and desirelss world-renouncer rather
than something related to the quantum physics or postmodern deconstruction. Virtually every
facet of life in a Zen monastery was governed by strict rules of ritual decorum; the
ritualization of daily life extended to even the most mundane of tasks such as cleaning ones
teeth or using the toilet. While the discursive content of the daily prayers and stra recitations,
the abbots sermons, and the kan collections reiterated ad nauseam the message that all form
is empty, world-renouncing monks were subject to immediate and often harsh punishment for

239

"The Demonization of Desire": Bernard Faure, The Red Thread. Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1998), 31.
240
Dalai Lama, Einfhrung in den Buddhismus. Die Harvard-Vorlesungen. Aus dem Amerikanischen von Christoph
Spitz (Freiburg-Basel-Wien: Herder, 1993), 183-4.
241
Schlingloff, Die Religion des Buddhismus. I. Der Heilsweg des Mnchtums, 78-81.
242
Dalai Lama, Einfhrung in den Buddhismus. Die Harvard-Vorlesungen, 116.
243
Louis Dumont, Individualismus. Zur Ideologie der Moderne (Frankfurt and New York: Campus, 1991), 318.
244

Elizabeth English, Vajrayogin : Her Visualizations, Rituals & Forms : A Study of the Cult of Vajrayogin in India
(Boston : Wisdom Publications, 2002), 129-30.
245
Geoffrey Samuel, Tantric Revisionings. New Understandings of Tibetan Buddhism and Indian Religion (Delhi:
Motilal Banarsidass, 2005), 84.
246
Robert Beer, Die Symbole des Tibetischen Buddhismus (Mnchen u.a.: Diederichs, 2003), 341.

63

any breach of ritual protocol a cogent reminder that emptiness was to be found precisely
within form.247
Buddhist idea and value is closely related to the yogic exercise.

248

The most important of

the four philosophical schools of Buddhism are the Mind-Only School and the School of the
Middle Way. Both represent both the selflessness of the person and the selflessness of
phenomena. A close reading and a precise understanding of what it means extinction of desire in
the specific world-renouncing context allows us to avoid unnecessary conceptual confusion.
The elimination of desire is to be read as a world-renouncing and yogic final state The worldrenouncer sought through self-abnegation (tapas) to eliminate desire and suppress action (or at
least all action that is impelled by desire) in order to reverse the causal process and, thus,
disinvolved from the world, to attain release.

249

The world-renouncing meditation of dead

bodies in various stages of decay and dismemberment focuses on the transience of the body.
This meditation is used "to develop disgust over the body."250 The meditation on disgust
(Ekelmeditationen)251 is world-renouncing.
The term "disgust against the body" has a long conceptual history in the Hindu-Buddhist
tradition of world-renunciation252 : Feeling that the body is not eternal, felt disgust and left for
the forest (avata manyamna

arra vairgyam upeto ra

ya nirja

-gma). A

Brahmin should become detached (or disgusted with the world) (parkya lokn karmacitn
brhmao nirvedam yt ). Masson (ibid) believe that the concern voiced ubiquitously by the
world-renouncer in Indian literature vairgya or nirveda, world weariness or disgust is
an oblique reference to the affective disorder known as sadness when mild, depression when
strong, and melancholia when severe. The most striking example of this phrase is one known to
every Sanskritist: yad ahar eva virajet, tad ahar eva pravrajet (On the very day that one
conceives disgust for the world, on that very day should one set out to wander alone.)
In Buddhaghosas Visuddhimagga which is considered as being extremely important for the
pratice of Buddhism, the observation on the impurity of the body is represented as one of the
main practices. The Buddhas disciples used to stay in places where dead bodies were thrown
away. The accunts of such experiences are relevant to the basic theory of Buddhism since they
suggest that the observance of the impurity of the body does serve as a way to purification. Here
we have a passage : I, a bhikkhu, going to a cemetery, saw a woman thrown out, thrown away
247

Robert H. Sharf, "Whose Zen? Zen Nationalism Revisited," in Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School, and the
Question of Nationalism (Nanzan Studies in Religion and Culture), edited by James W. Heisig and John Maraldo
(Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1995), 41.
248
See die Yogischen bungen eines Bodhisattva(Dalai Lama, Einfhrung in den Buddhismus. Die HarvardVorlesungen, 89, 149.
249
Orlan Lee, From Acts of Non-Action to Acts: The Dialectical. Basis for Social Withdrawal or Commitment to
this World in the Buddhist Reformation, History of Religions 65.4 (1967), 280.
250
Peter Gng, Was ist Buddhismus?, Frankfurt, New York (Campus), 1996, 49.
251
Michael von Brck, Einfhrung in den Buddhismus (Frankfurt a.M: Verlag der Weltreligionen im Insel-Verlag
2007), 93.
252
J. Moussaieff Masson, "The psychology of the ascetic", Journal of Asian Studies 35.4 (1976), 618.

64

in the cemetery, being devoured by worms.253 The word svathika is defined as a cemetery,
place where dead bodies are thrown to rot away. Follwing this, we find a detailing of
meditations on the discarded rotting body. All these observations are concerned with seeing
the impurity of the body, and consequently, the suggestion is that one should avoid ones own
body. Thus, the body should be considered not only physically impure as a matter of fact, but
also empty (tuccha) both inside and outside (ajjhatta ca bahiddh). Consequently, one should
give up the body.In other words, immortality or nirva, the ultimate goal, can be attained by
means of observing the impurity of the body. Through such an observation one can duly give up
the body.254Therefore, Buddhist emptiness should be understood against this background of
world-renouncing meditation on the impurity of the body.
In this context, the relationship between body-renunciation (Leibentsagung) and ritual selfmutilation and suicide has to be elucidated. Kleine maintains that ritual self-mutilation and
suicide have a long tradition in East Asian Buddhism. Such incidents in historiographic and
hagiographic sources dated to 1,500 years ago "are exceptionally well documented." In practice,
the so-called body-renunciation (Leibentsagung) is a phenomenon that has played a
considerable role in the public consciousness within and outside the Buddhist order. The bodyrenouncer (Leibentsager) sacrificed himself not only for the Buddha or Bodhisattva, but also
he donated his body for starving animals. Strikingly, the numbers of body-renouncer
(Leibentsager, wangshen) are large among the woman world-renouncers. In addition to bodyhatred, (self-) sacrificial willingness to commit suicide (Opferwille zum Suizid) drove them
apparently. This sacrificial dimension of the world-renouncing and body-renouncing (disgust)
meditation must be taken into consideration. "Body-hatred and weariness of life" and "the
horror of his own body was an important motive for ritual suicide.

255

The body-renouncing meditation can also be comprehended against the backdrop of the
ritual disembodiment of world-renouncer" (rituelle Entkrperlichung des Entsagenden). The
Upaniad begins with ritual disembodiment of world-renouncer." Here world-renouncer is
freed from his body - "ritually dematerialized" (rituell entmaterialisiert.256 The essential
difference as well as superficial and formal similarities between Buddhis body-renouncing
world-renunciation and Christian renunciation should be not overlooked. The purpose of
Christian asceticism is, as Dumoulin has rightly pointed out, not destruction or suppression of
the body, but the control of its forces and tendencies, and their orientation to the spiritualization
of the human (Vergeistigung des Menschen).257

253

Theragth 315.
Shiraishi, Asceticism in Buddhism and Brahmanism : A Comparative Study, 186-7.
255
Kleine, Sterben fr den Buddha, Sterben wie der Buddha, 4, 13, 14.
256
J. F. Sprockhoff, "Die Alten im Alten Indien - Ein Versuch nach brahmanischen Quellen", Saeculum 30 (1979),
394.
257
Heinrich Dumoulin, stliche Meditation und Christliche Mystik (Freiburg/ Mnchen: Karl Alber, 1966), 65.
254

65

The extinction of desire in Buddhism was ritual demand for the world-renunciation and
body-renunciation. Those who are tormented by desire take the ugliness as the object of
meditation. For someone who is confused and full of doubt, as a meditation object, the chain of
twelve links in the emergence of mutual dependence in terms of the cycle of rebirth is
recommended.258 The "meditation on the impurity" (aubha-bhvan )" reflects the meditation
of and for the world-renouncer: Due to the intense contemplation on his decaying body, worldrenouncer have such a strong "dislike of their bodies," that some of them get rid of it by
jumping into the deep, by taking poison or the use of a knife.259
Notwithstanding the possible psychotherapeutic effect from meditation, it should be noted
that meditation on disgust done by early Buddhist monks (Ekelmeditationen)260 had its worldrenouncing purpose. According to Heiler,261 meditation on the anatomical human body is
designed to "provoke a fierce loathing of everything corporeal." In Zen Buddhism, the body was
considered as "bag of manure" and "bag of excrement."

262

The ideal body of the Buddhist

practitioner was a closed body, without outflows (a metaphorical designation for

defilements). Wulou, a Korean monk living during the Tang, whose name, meainig without
Outflows, was interpreted literally by hagiographers who attributed to him the gift of never
excreting.

263

Buddhist world-renouncers yogic meditation on disgustingness and devoidness of human

body (Meditation ber die Ekelhaftigkeit und Nichtigkeit des menschlichen Krpers)264 should
be viewed as sacrificial rather than psychotherapeutic. Buddhist value of detachment was
originally related to the world-renunciation. The reason for the abandonment of rites and the
basis for many of the rules and customs of world-renunciation is the fundamental virtue that is
expected to govern a world-renouncers life: detachment from and disgust toward (vairgya) all
worldly things. Detachment is the one necessary condition for world-renunciation.265Disgust
with the world as one condition for world-renunciation can be interpreted within the framework
of mechanism of reconciliatory victims. Reconciliatory victim, Oedipus, also disgusted with
himself and pleads the city of Thebes to spit on him.266

258

Dalai Lama, Logik der Liebe. Aus den Lehren des Tibetischen Buddhismus fr den Westen (Mnchen: Goldmann
Arkana, 1989), 231..
259
Kleine, Sterben fr den Buddha, Sterben wie der Buddha, 19.
260
Von Brck, Einfhrung in den Buddhismus, 93.
261
Friedrich Heiler, Die buddhistische Versenkung. Eine religionsgeschichtliche Untersuchung (Mnchen: Reinhardt
1918), 15-6.
262
Suzuki Shosan, Du Wirst Sterben! Der Zen-Krieger II, Aus dem Englischen von Guido Keller (Frankfurt:
Angkor, 2001), 15.
263
Bernard Faure, The Red Thread. Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998),
61-2.
264
Moritz Winternitz, Geschichte der indischen Literatur, Band 2 (Stuttgart: Koehler, 1968), 62.
265
Olivelle, Sanysa Upaniads: Hindu Scriptures on Asceticism and Renunciation, 75.
266
Ren Girard, Der Sndenbock (Zrich:Benziger, 1988), 97.

66

A text strucutured by some kind of collective victimage wil reflect the view of the
victimizers and therefore wil not advertise itself for what it is. Some modern critics vaguely
present Oedipus as some kind of pharmakos, but they cannot point to an explicit pharmakos or
scapegoat motif anywhere in the Oedipus myth.The only interpretation that makes sense is the
one that postulates the real process of scapegoating as the generative and organizing force
behind all themes. 267
Buddhist world-renouncer who has practiced sla must train his mind first in particular ways,
so that it may be possible for him to acquire the chief concentration of meditation called jhna.
Thus as a preparatory measure, firstly he has to train his mind continually to view with
disgust the appetitive desires for eating and drinking (hre patikklasa) by emphasizing
in the mind the various troubles that are associated in seeking food and drink and their ultimate
loathsome transformations as various nauseating bodily elements. When a world-renouncer
continually habituates himself to emphasize the disgusting associations of food and drink, he
ceases to have any attachment to them, only awaiting the day when the final dissolution of all
sorrows will come.268

4.4. Buddhism of Laity and of Kings and its Worldly Desires

To avoid a one-sided picture of the nirvanic (meditation) Buddhism, it is important to
perceive search of happiness in Buddhism, especially Buddhism of political kings. Buddhism
depended for its patronage mostly on kings. Where such patronage was lacking, it declined.
"Buddhism of desire-satisfaction" (Buddhismus der Wunschbefriedigung) has often been
neglected.269As we shall see later, in capitalism, Buddhism, the antimaterialist doctrine par
excellence, finds itself in support of the most materialist of economic ideologies. 270
For iek, although Western Buddhism presents itself as the remedy against the
stressful tension of the capitalist dynamics, allowing us to uncouple and retain inner peace and
Gelassenheit, it actually functions as its perfect ideological supplement. The Western
Buddhist meditative stance is arguably the most efficient way, for us, to fully participate in the
capitalist dynamic while retaining the appearance of mental sanity. Western Buddhism thus
perfectly fits the fetishist mode of ideology in our allegedly post-ideological era, as opposed
to its traditional symptomal mode. iek calls Western Buddhism as such a fetish: it enables
267

Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly(ed), Violent Origins. Walter Burkert, Ren Girard, and Jonathan Z. Smith on Ritual
Killing and Cultural Formation (Standford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 112.
268
Surendranath Dasgupta, A History of Indian Philosophy, Vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1957),
102.

269

Kng, Zum christlich-buddhistischen Dialog, 19.

Marcus Pound, iek: A (Very) Critical Introduction (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdemans Publishing.
Company 2008), 130.

270

67

you to fully participate in the frantic pace of the capitalist game while sustaining the
perception that you are not really in it, that you are well aware how worthless this spectacle is
that really matters to you is the peace of the inner Self to which you know you can always
withdraw.271
In the book, Streben nach Glck (Pursuit of Happyness), rituals and practices for obtaining
this-worldly benefits in various Buddhist schools are presented. Shingon- and TendaiBuddhism keep the ritual forms of the positive influence on fate that have been developed for
hundreds of years and in Japan handed down until today. Also in Zen Buddhism, which posits
the attainment of Buddhahood without mediation by any other active power (taraki), refer to the
recitation of the Heart and the Kannon Sutra and the sale of protective and lucky charms with
the confidence in their protecting power.272
Faure has noted the desire-satisfying and magic dimension of Buddhism : While Buddhism
is estimated in the West mainly because of his philosophical wealth of ideas and meditation
techniques, his historicall success for the ruling class was based primarily on a "wealth of
magical recipes". The monks enjoyed reputation primarily as a miracle-worker. This
"fascination with the miracle workers" who can be seen even in early Buddhism became , as
Faure has argued, in Mahyna and reached its full extent in Tantric Buddhism. First, the
Buddhist forces were desired mainly "for the protection of the state."273 The Buddhist Samgha
was a centralized, state-sponsored and state-controlled organization under royal or state
sponsorship. Political rule is closely associated with Buddhism, both through the ideology of the
cakravartin or dharmaraja, and through the significance of Buddhist sacred objects such as the
Emerald Buddha in Thailand or the Buddhas Tooth Relic in Sri Lanka as focal points of state
power.

274

One of the phrases that is frequently used by Korean scholars to describe Korean

Buddhism, is hogk pulgyo (), literally state-protecting Buddhism.275

Girards hermeneutics of the sacralzing mechanism of the founding victim sheds new light
on the relationship between the Buddhist world-renouncing saints of the forest and the cult of
sacralized amulets. In his book The Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets
(Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology 49), Tambiah writes: The Buddhas Tooth Relic
annually went into seclusion and returned to the city with intensified potency. Fa-Hian reported
that as a result of the rites performed the kingdom suffered neither from famine, calamity nor
revolution. The tooth relic itself was housed in the Palace of the Tooth Relic (Dalad
271

Slavoj iek, On Belief (New York: Routledge, 2001), 12-5.

Michael Pye, Katja Triplett, mit Beitrgen von Monika Schrimpf, Streben nach Glck. Schicksalsdeutung und
Lebensgestaltung in japanischen Religionen (Religise Gegenwart Asiens. Studies in Modern Asian Religions 1),
(Berlin / Mnster: Lit-Verlag 2007), 41-5.
273
Bernard Faure, Der Buddhismus (Bern/Mnchen/Wien: Scherz Verlag, 1998), 124-5.
274
Geoffrey Samuel, Civilized Shamans. Buddhism in Tibetan Societies (Washington/London: Smithsonian
Institution Press, 1993), 25.
275
Hyun-key Kim Hogarth, Syncretism of Buddhism and Shamanism in Korea (Korean Studies Series No. 21),
(Seoul: Jimoondang Publishing Company), 156-7.
272

68

Mligva), which was part of the palace complex itself. The tooth relic together with the
weapons of the four major guardian deity of the kingdom circumambulate the city at night.276
Girard's formulations concerning sacralizing mechanism of surrogate victim seem insightful
as to this Buddhist Ritual Theater of the Modern State. The Sacred Tooths procession created
fields of merit that mapped a universal Buddhist cosmology onto the territory of a modern
nation-state.277Buddhas Tooth Relic is distinctive in the extent to which it has functioned as the
royal palladium of Sri Lankan monarchs. The tooth relic was enshirned within the precincts of
the royal palace and it moved from place to place with the relocation of the Sri Lnkan capital.278
The Buddhist ordination also was viwed as "a magic ritual" for the "worldly profit."279 The
Buddhist monasteries functioned as places of worship for the "desire"of the Buddhist Upsaka
to acquire religious merit and to protect against evil influences.280 According to Faure, the cult
of the 'most revered' was a key feature of the medieval Japanese Buddhism. Tantrism was
characterized by the belief in miracles and the efficacy of magical rituals and his "close ties with
the political power". Thus monks were selected not for their virtues, but by their ability to
protect the imperial family by male descendants and destroyed if necessary, even their enemies
through rituals.281
The Buddhist Stra itself may have the function of a protective amulet, as documented since
ancient times in Japan.282 The Pli Buddhist texts were also used as a spell. When Buddhism
spread to the Thai farmers, they fed, housed, sponsored, and themselves became Buddhist
monks, not because they wished to escape birth, but primarily to acquire magical power. The
ritual code of behavior of the Sangha was considered efficacious in bringing about increased
chance of prosperity and Pli texts were used as spells to ward off danger and illness.283
"Talisman charakter of the Buddhist scriptures" needs to be considered.284The books of the
Prajnpramit was used as "talisman, lucky charm" against the evils of the world.285

276

Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah, The Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets. A Study in Charisma,
Hagiography, Sectarianism, and Millennial Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 73-4.
277
Juliane Schober, Buddhist Just Rule and Burmese National Culture: State Patronage of the Chinese Tooth Relic
in Myanma, in History of Religions 36 (1997), 225.
278
Kevin Trainor, Relics, Ritual and Representation in Buddhism. Rematerializing the Sri Lankan Theravda
Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 31.
279
Bernard Faure, Visions of Power. Imagining Medieval Japanese Buddhism (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1996), 75.
280
Bareau, Der indische Buddhismus, 116.
281
Faure, Der Buddhismus, 127.
282
Pye and Triplett, Streben nach Glck. Schicksalsdeutung und Lebensgestaltung in japanischen Religionen, 44.
283
B. J. Terwiel, Monks and Magic: An Analysis of Religious Ceremonies in Central Thailand (Bangkok: White
Lotus, 1994), 14.
284
Faure, Der Buddhismus, 107.
285
Marino Omodeo Sal, Buddhismus: Lehre und Geschichte, Olten (Freiburg im Breisgau: Walter-Verlag, 1962),
63-4.

69

Having found Buddhist texts used as spells, it will be less, as Gombrich has maintained,286
surprising to find a relic used as a talisman. The "philosophical texts" of Buddhism were often
used as a "magic formulas (dhras)", such as the Heart Stra as a symbol of Mahyna
teaching. The Lakvatra Stra (one of the most important stras of Mahyna Buddhism)
was used mainly as a talisman text.
"magic formula."

288

287

In particular, the ninth chapter was dedicated to the

Some Buddhist texts, certain stras which were called Parritta, were

granted a special power to expel evil. In some areas, such as in Ceylon, they are used as a
blessing or incantatory formulas.289
Buddhist texts contain often "endless repetition." 290 The bad habit of continuous
repetition"is driven in the more comprehensive Prajpramits so excessive to the point that it
would be almost more than half of a giant piece such as the atashasrik Prajpramit write
out of head, because the same sentences and phrases return literally.291
My argument concerns the way existing reciprocity between world-renunciation and the
(political) world order works, in which an anthropological dialectic between world-renouncing
desire-extinction of Buddhist monks and the worldly desire for karmic merit (puya ) by the
Buddhist lay people and the kings are represented. Chan monks became engrossed in enshrining
relics and erecting funerary stpa thereby creating new centers, new sacred spaces or places
that were entrusted to the protection of local gods and eventually became identified with them.
This phenomenon, according to Faure, had its source in highly literate monastic circles and
should not be read merely as the subversion of a great tradition by local cults. The erection of
stpa paradoxically reflected the sacralization of Chan. Within the Chan school itself,
mythology was displaced by hagiography, and Chan faith was anchored in the lives of
eminent anchorites.292 After their death, Buddhist world-renouncer are associated with certain
sacred places, sometimes marked by stpas.293 Different from this Buddhist (householders)
collective sacralization of world-renouncer (especially of world-renouncers relics), the Biblical

286

Richard F. Gombrich, Precept and Practice. Traditional Buddhism in the Rural Highlands of Ceylon (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1971), 208.
287
Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights. An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition, 148, 149, n. 17.
288
Alex Wayman, Esoteric Buddhism, in Buddhism and Asian History. Religion, History, and Culture. Readings
from the Encyclopedia of Religion (Mircea Eliade, Editor in Chief), ed. Joseph M. Kitagawa and Mark D. Cummings.
New York and London, 1987, 242.
289
Bareau, Der indische Buddhismus, 118.
290
Adel Th. Khoury, Texte aus den Lehrreden des Buddha. In: Buddha fr Christen. Eine Herausforderung.
Einleitung von Erhard Meier. Textauswahl von Adel Theodor Khoury (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder Verlag Herder,
1986), 60.
291
Ibid., 248. Denn es besteht, wie alle Prajpramits, nur aus endlosen Wiederholungen der Lehrstze des von
Ngrjuna begrndeten Mdhyamikasystems (Moritz Winternitz, Geschichte der indischen Literatur, Band 2, 250).
292
Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights. An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition, 171.
293
Ray, Buddhist Saints in India. A Study in Buddhist Values & Orientations, 194.

70

and Christian tradition, Girard asserts, was the first to upset the supremacy of the crowd, to
see violent unanimity from the other side, and to pinpoint the principle of reciprocity.294
Early Buddhist monastic communities were, in fact, preoccupied not only with disposing
of their dead but with ritually and elaborately housing them as well. There is clear evidence that
indicated the existence of an extensive monastic cemetery associated with the Buddhist
monastic site and clear evidence for the elaborate housing and worshiping of the remains of the
monastic dead.295

4.5.Sacrificial Mechanism of Merit Transfer

According to Gombrich, the Buddhist Sagha is the highest field for the merit. The merit
transfer plays the important role in the Theravdin tradition. The mimetic analysis of the double
transference onto a scapegoat can assist in explaining the relationship between the Buddhist
ritual of the dead and the merit transfer (Totenrituale und Verdienstbertragung).296 The
(secular) lay Buddhists who are not so clearly differentiated from the rest of the population have
apparently set their goals lower and desired only a rebirth in heaven (or in good weather
conditions on earth). For them, earning a "spiritual coin, a medium of exchange," for which one
could get things that you can not buy money. The "fairly simplistic treatment of merit as a
spiritual value of trade" often happens when are said of lay followers.297
There was also "the passionate search for miraculous powers" in Buddhism that were sought
generally in order to meet only worldly passions."298 There was the overwhelming acceptance
of merit transfer in Buddhism. The world-renouncing bhikkus merit is transferred to the layman,
as the layman transfers food to the bhikku ( a process that is seen not only in the raddha
transaction but in the svadharma basis of the caste system, whereby one group achieves merit
for another group restricted to a less auspicious profession). 299 We can read the hiden
mechanism of surrogate victim and sacralizing misinterpretation in the processes of transference
(transfer of sin from householder to world-renouncer and transfer of merit from worldrenouncer to worldly householder).

294

Ren Girard and Benot Chantre, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benot Chantre (East Lansing:
Michigan State University Press, 2010), 63.
295
Schopen, Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks, 8.
296
Gombrich, Der Theravada-Buddhismus. Vom alten Indien bis zum modernen Sri Lanka, 131-4, 168 ;. Richard
Gombrich, Merit Transference in Singhalese Buddhism: A Case Study of the Interaction between Doctrine and
Practice, in History of Religions 11 (1971).
297
Gombrich, Der Theravada-Buddhismus. Vom alten Indien bis zum modernen Sri Lanka, 131-2.
298
Bareau, Der indische Buddhismus, 179-80.
299
Wendy Doniger OFlaherty, Karma and Rebirth in Classical Indian Traditions (Berkeley-Los Angeles-London:
University of California Press., 1980), xiii.

71

Buddha himself has practiced "apotropaic rituals."300 The success of Buddhism in Japan can
be explained largely by its apotropaic function.301 Apotropaic rituals of Newar Buddhism, Tibet
and Japan are lastingly important.302 For Tibetan Buddhists, the observance of certain rules and
ritual feeding of Buddhist world-renouncer have created a kind of guarantee, a sort of talisman
against dangers and threats.303 The sacred power of world-renouncer was used for the purpose
of appeasement, increase of fortune, the expulsion of enemy forces and for obtaining terrifying
power. A common thread that runs through the Esoteric Buddhism of ubhakara-siha,
Vajrabodhi, Amoghavajra, and their disciples in the Late Tang was the interdependence of the
achievement of enlightenment and various forms of worldly benefit. Much of these masterss
lives were spent in mundane pursuits and in constructing rituals mainly of apotropaic and
political value. There were rituals for the imperial family, high courtiers, and generals, both
living and dead and rituals designed to protect and maintain the state and the cosmic order.

304

For Max Weber, Buddhist lay morality has the character of a very colorless 'civil' ethics and
worldly purpose : wealth and an honorable name.305 Weber dated the occurrence of a 'popular'
Buddhism with its ritual recitation of Parittas, its cult of stpas and his meritorious pilgrimage
to post-canonical Aoka period. But Tambiah 306 maintains that those typical features of
popular Buddhism of Aoka appeared already in canonical time. For example, the Buddha
himself has admitted the existence of magical forces, and recited Paritta chants at various
prominent events and also approved the cult of the pilgrimages to stpas containing his relics.
The cult of Buddhist world-renouncer (The cult of the saint ), as Ray puts it, is oriented both
to living saints and , after death, to the stpa (or its functional equivalent, such as saintss
images or relics), which localizes their ongoinng presence.307 This sacralization of worldrenouncer by worldly householder will be later interpreted the viewpoint of Girards analysis of
surrogate victim mechanism.
The stpa in India is a funerary monument, sometime of large dimensions, that enshrines
relics of the Buddha. Through the meditaitions, Buddhist world-renouncer will reconfigure his
body as a stpa, the mystical body of Mahvairocana, and thereby become a buddha himself.
Buddhist text describes the production of the living-body relic the meditative destruction
300

Kwangsu Lee, Buddhist Ideas and Rituals in Early India and Korea (Delhi: Manohar, 1998), 128.
Bernard Faure, Visions of Power. Imagining Medieval Japanese Buddhism, translated from the French by Phyllis
Brooks (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 113.
302
Elizabeth English, Vajrayogin. Her Visualizations, Rituals, and Forms. A Study of the Cult of Vajrayogin in
India. Studies in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism (Boston : Wisdom Publications, 2002), 3.
303
Giuseppe Tucci and Walther Heissig, Die Religionen Tibets und der Mongolei, in Die Religionen der
Menschheit. Band 20, ed. Christel Matthais Schrder (Stuttgart-Berlin-Kln-Mainz: Kohlhammer Verlag, 1970), 3940.
304
Charles D. Orzech and James H. Sanford. Worship of the Ladies of the Dipper, in David Gordon White (ed),
Tantra in Practice. Princeton Reading in Religions (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000), 384-5.
305
Weber, Gesammelte Aufstze zur Religionssoziologie II. Hinduismus und Buddhismus, 247.
306
Tambiah, Max Webers Untersuchung des frhen Buddhismus. Eine Kritik, 235-6.
307
Ray, Buddhist Saints in India. A Study in Buddhist Values & Orientations, 45.
301

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of the world-renouncers ordinary body and the creation of a stpa-like cosmic body. Buddhist
meditation culminates in the production of a perfect body, a living-body relic which is a
condensation of the entire universe. It is connected with East Asian practices of selfmummification, by which world-renouncer sought to achieve a Buddha body in the present
lifetime. These ascetics, called sokushinbutsu (buddhas in their present body) in Japanese,
aimed to turn their body into the ultimate stpa-like, whole-body relic

308

Since the Buddhas

physical remains could be divided, replicated, and distributed, new stupas containing relics
could be constructed. They became a focal point for worship wherever Buddhism spread, first
within India and then beyond. Stpas had a locative significance through which the Buddha was
associated with specific territorial units. 309
Girards analysis of the Metaphor of the Tomb can help bring clarity to this Buddhist
sacralizing cult of tomb (stpa) containing world-renouncers relics and continous reproduction
of stpa-like, whole-body relic through Buddhist meditation. All cultures and all religions are
built on this foundation, which they then conceal, just as the tomb is built around the dead body
that it conceals. Murder calls for the tomb and the tomb is but the prolongation and perpetuation
of murder. The tomb-religion amouns to nothing more or less than the becoming invisible of
the foundations, of religion and culture. It is the tomb that is the starting-point of the
constitutive displacement of culture. For Girard, Ancient rituals took shape around the first of
the reconciliatory victims, on the basis of the creative transference achieved by the first
communities. This is also brings to mind the sacrificial stones that mark the foundation of
ancient cities, which are invariably associated with some story of a lynching, ineffectively
camouflaged. The whole of human culture, for Girard, is based on the mythic process of
conjuring away mans violence by endlessly projecting it upon new victims. All cultures and all
religions are built on this foundation, which they then conceal, just as the tomb is built around
the dead body that it conceals.310
The Buddhist stupas, as well as being a funerary monument enlivened by the relics of the
Buddha, is a cosmolographic image with Mt. Sumeru at its core and the heavenly realms
situated at its peak. The Theravda community of the canonical period accepted, with certain
key changes in emphasis, one of the major traditions of Indian cosmogonic mythology. The stup,
with its strongly cosmographic structure, was a basic center of worship and veneration in
Thailand, as elsewhere in the Theravda world. In fact each Thai capital had its special stupa or
Golden Mount (i.e., its Mt. Sumeru) which constituted the symbolic center of the territory over

308

Fabio Rambelli, Tantric Buddhism and Chinese Thought in East Asia, in David Gordon White (ed), Tantra in
Practice. Princeton Reading in Religions (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000), 365-8.
309
Frank E. Reynolds and Charles Hallisey, The Buddha, pp. 29-49 In Joseph M. Kitagawa and Mark D.
Cummings (ed), Buddhism and Asian History. Religion, History, and Culture. Readings from the Encyclopedia of
Religion (Mircea Eliade, Editor in Chief), (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1987), 39.
310
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 163-7.

73

which the local monarch ruled. 311 Building eighty-four thousand stupas over eighty-four
thousand minute relics, Aoka was trying to reconstruct the Buddhas physical body on the face
of his own realm, Jambudvpa. No longer are the Buddhas physical remains randomly
dispersed here and there. They are now cosmologically organized and spread throughout the
kingdom. It is now cosmological and has been systematically implanted in and identified with
the kingdom.312
The application of Girard's theory on the sacralizing mechanism of the surrogate victim
helps to explain the Buddhist cult of the world-renouncing Buddhas. Under the title 10. The
Buddhist Saints and the Stpa, Ray has dealt with these themes. In classical times, the stpa
provided a symbolic and ritual focus of the Buddhist cult of saints. The particular
importance of the stpa in the (sacralizing) cult of Buddhist world-renouncing saints derives
from the fact that, once ritually empowered, in an important sense the stpa was the saint,
although now the body was composed of mortar and stones, rather than flesh and blood. This
identification of stpa and the body of the saint is reflected in various strands of evidence.
The identity of the stpa with the physical body of the Buddha is also seen in the
iconographic tradition, in which the stpa is seen as the idealized structure of the Buddhas
body. The stpa is understood as having a central role in affording protection to kings and
their subject. In the circumambulation (pradaksin), one walks around the stpa in a clockwise
direction. There is the great merit of circumambulation. The sacralization of the place is
effected by the spiritual presence of the Buddha. The symbolic identity and ritual
complementarity of living saint and stpa may be seen by comparing the paradigm of the
Buddhist saints with the stpa symbolism and cult. Like world-renouncer, the stpa is an object
of veneration for both Buddhist laity and renunciants, who worship with circumambulation,
prostrations, offerings, praises, and so on.313
In the view of Paul Mus, when a king constructs stpas to house relics, he and his kingdom
become a kind of living reliquary; to the extent that stpas constitute mesocosms cosmic
centers for the ritual invocation. Evidence, according to Ruppert, suggests the importance of the
construction and veneration of stpas to the economies of South and East Asia. The building of
stpas required extensive mobilization not only of relics but also of materials and resources. In
particular, kings and other wealthy patrons of Buddhism paid for the movement of large
quantities of precious substances to adorn the stpas, which contributed to the spread of the
faith as well as to the increased flow of wealth throughout South and East Asia. They also
sponsored relic processions, which mobilized relics for public veneration. Rulers and other lay

311

Frank Reynolds and Mani B. Reynolds, Three Worlds According to King Ruang: A Thai Buddhist Cosmology
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 17, 21.
312
John Strong, The Legend of King Aoka (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), 117, 119.
313
Ray, Buddhist Saints in India. A Study in Buddhist Values & Orientations, 325-83.

74

Buddhists presumably believed that such construction and veneration enabled them to improve
their karmic destiny.314
The worship of relics enlarged the scope of the potential power of merit-making. Out of the
numerable meritorious activities that Buddhist worldly householder can perform, ritual feeding
of homeless world-renouncer (dna) has long been considered as the most meritorious one. In
many ways, this is the Buddhist act of merit par excellence. Stpa worship also became a
popular method of merit-making.315 Schopen points out the Buddhist conception of relics as
living entities and stupa as a legal person. Other early sources indicate that the physical
relics of Sakyamuni were endowed with more than just life or breath. They were
informed, Parfume, saturated, imbued with just those characteristics that defined the
living Buddha. Stupa was coginitively classified as a living person of rank. 316

4.6. Magical Powers from Meditation

It also needs to be noted that extraordinary magical powers (siddhi) from Yoga practice are
expected both in Buddhism and Yoga. For example, the divine ear, the memory of previous
births, look-through to the causes of suffering, that is until the law of karma and the saskra.
The magic power of meditation can be understood as a power for the sake of worldly desire.317
Knowledge in India is always equated with "power."318 Philosophy is power.319Most Western
scholars have down-played the importance of the siddhis in Indian ascetic and yogic traditions,
by writing them off a kind of corruption, by-product, or dangerous hindrance to yogic practice.
But in fact, as Urban320 argues, they are really of central importance to most yogic schools.
That the Buddha and his followers were supported by laypersons for reasons of material gain
and magical protection, as well as for spiritual benefit, cannot be denied. Even meditation, the
sine qua non of monastic practice,

was perceived as leading not only to equanimity and

enlightenment but also to the acquisition of magical power. The Mahvagga of the Theravda

314

, Brian D. Ruppert, Jewel in the Asches. Buddha Relics and Power in Early Medieval Japan (Cambridge, Masss.:
Harvard University Asia Center, 2000), 20-25, 35.
315
Lee, Buddhist Ideas and Rituals in Early India and Korea, 79.
316
Schopen, Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks, 125-30.
317
Hugh B . Urban, The Path of Power: Impurity, Kingship, and Sacrifice in Assamese Tantra, in Journal of the
American Academy of Religion 69, no.4 (2001), 804.
318
Dieter Schlingloff, Die Religion des Buddhismus 2, Der Heilsweg fr die Welt (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1963), 47.
319
3. Philosophie als Macht (Heinrich Zimmer, Philosophie und Religion Indiens (Zrich: Suhrkamp, 1973), 62-3.
320
Hugh B. Urban, The Remnants of Desire: Sacrificial Violence and Sexual Transgression in the Cult of the
Kplikas and in the Writings of Georges Bataille, in Religion 25 (1995), 82.

75

Vinaya Piaka depicts the Buddha not simply as an enlightened teacher, but also a yogin who
wins followers through his magic.321
Magical powers from meditation (Zauberkrfte aus der Meditation) is constitutive im
Buddhism. 322 Wonders of the magic power produced by meditation belong already to the
Buddhist way to liberation. At the fourth stage of meditation, the monk can release his spirit
from the body and cause the resultant manifold ecstatic states. Buddha himself has acquired
magical powers in the night of his enlightenment. So it happens that the magic powers are
presented primarily as skills of a Buddha in the later Buddhist dogmatic. There are other
miracles such as the famous twin miracle of Sravasti. After the Buddha returned to his father's
kingdom, uncertainty still existed about whether Gautama Buddha was really enlightened or not.
In response, the Buddha allegedly displayed the twin miracle. The twin miracle are depicting
Gautama Buddha producing flames from the upper part of his body and streams of water from
the lower part of his body.323
Schlingloff has described the "magical powers of Buddhist way of liberation and twin
miracles of Buddha. In the Buddhist 'doctrine' is emphasized that not only the Buddha, but his
disciples can dominate the twin miracles. The Buddha also created a double by the twin
miracles. This double is now duplicated to an "Buddha-accumulation" (Buddhahufung).324 The
skillfulness of being able to duplicate itself, is one of the "magic powers of Buddhist way to
liberation,"325 but it is an ability that is exclusively reserved for the Buddha. Each of the 80 000
Buddhas can duplicate 80000 Buddhas from his body and the so duplicated Buddhas
accomplish the same duplication again. There thus exists a number of 800003 Buddhas. Such
descriptions are reminiscent of the endless series of Buddhas, which are sometimes decorated
with Buddhist monasteries in walls and ceilings. But such duplication of Buddhas can be also
produced in meditation.
Therefore the following remarks concerning Buddha is to be critically examined: He
[Buddha] neither sought nor proclaimed an epiphany of the sacred; and his prescription for
liberation was not dependent on ritual, sacrifice, a relationship to the gods, or the expulsion of
victims. 326 We need to reconsider the violent sacred surrounding the world-renouncing
Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. We must not forget that the "magic powers grow out of meditation."
Often, the reports stressed that the Buddha sits in meditation posture in order to perform
miracles and penetrates in the fire element.327
321

Donald K. Swearer, Folk Buddhism, in Buddhism and Asian History. Religion, History, and Culture.
Readings from the Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Joseph M. Kitagawa and Mark D. Cummings (New York:
Macmillan, 1989), 351-2.
322
Schlingloff, Die Religion des Buddhismus. II. Der Heilsweg fr die Welt, 50-4.
323
Schlingloff, Die Religion des Buddhismus. I. Der Heilsweg des Mnchtums, 63.
324
Schlingloff, Die Religion des Buddhismus. II. Der Heilsweg fr die Welt, 51-2.
325
Schlingloff, Die Religion des Buddhismus. I. Der Heilsweg des Mnchtums, 62.
326
Lefebure, Mimesis, Violence, and Socially Engaged Buddhism: Overture to a Dialogue, 129.
327
Schlingloff, Die Religion des Buddhismus. II. Der Heilsweg fr die Welt, 50-1.

76

In India, knowledge is said to be power. If the Buddha is omniscient, he must also be

superior in power, and in "magic power" to all other beings. The Buddha knows and
understands the "magic of incantation."328 Even the knowledge of the Vedic sacrificial sayings
had magical power. Mysterious, unintelligible words and syllables of the ritual became
independent and were used as incantations for spells. The Buddha taught his monks that they
protect themselves by incantations against snake bite or make the snake venom ineffective.
After the Buddha informed the wards to nanda, he has explictly stated that this spell has
tremendous power.329 The overemphasis on the Buddhist indifference and detachment is to be
corrected with the help of the historical knowledge of the lay Buddhist kings and worldly
interest in the (magic) powers (Siddhi) and the karmic merit. Bhattacharyya (1993, 64) has also
pointed to the worldly character of the Siddhis.330
The Buddhist saints have long since been no more restraints to use their magical powers.
Their example is the Hindu Yogins with their capabilities of siddhi.331 Although the renouncer
is exhorted not to be tempted into using the supranormal powers (siddhi) that are generated by
yogic meditation but to ascend higher into liberation, yet the Viuddhimagga itself gives stories
of the Buddha and his left-hand disciple Mahmoggalana using their power of siddhi to perform
astounding feats.332 The various stages of meditation were equated with celestial spheres. This
indicated that the mind of the meditator rises into the higher worlds. To "the miraculous powers
acquired through meditation (iddhi)" are both extraordinary states of consciousness, and unusual
physical abilities.333 The meditator reaches the condition known as "destruction of perception
and sensation."
The deeper reason for the "yogic miracles" lies in the correspondence of microcosm and
macrocosm. According to ancient Indian belief, the Yogi rises to the celestial sphere in the
world of Brahma at the first stage of meditation.334

Who won the "rule of the micro-cosmic

forces" in the self through meditation, commands the forces of the macrocosm.335 The yogin
becomes creator, ruler and destroyer of the world. A mastery of forces within the soul affects
the entire universe.336 "The continuity of the lower siddhis and enlightenment as two stages in
the same way" (Kontinuitt der niederen siddhis und der Erleuchtung als zwei Stufen
328

Ibid., 47, 45.

Ibid., 46-7.
330
Bhattacharyya, Buddhism in the History of Indian Ideas, 64.
331
Ulrich Schneider, Einfhrung in den Buddhismus. 2. Aufl (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1987),
133.
332
Stanley J. Tambiah, Purity and Auspiciousness at the Edge of the Hindu Context in Theravda Buddhist
Societies, in J.B. Carman and F.A. Marglin, eds. Purity and Auspiciousness in Indian Society (International Studies in
Sociology and Social Anthropology) (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1985), 107, n.6.
333
Heinrich Dumoulin, Geschichte des Zen-Buddhismus. Band I: Indien und China (Bern: Francke-Verlag, 1985), 26.
334
Schlingloff, Die Religion des Buddhismus. II. Der Heilsweg fr die Welt, 93.
335
Dumoulin, stliche Meditation und Christliche Mystik, 140-1.
336
Matthias Hermanns, Das National-Epos der Tibeter Gling Knig Ge Sar (Regensburg: Verlag Josef Habbel,
1965), 179-80.
329

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aufdemselben Wege) are not in principle disputed. This fact is expressed e.g. in the common
name of "enlightenment as 'supreme siddhi'" and the extensive parallelization of both
phenomena. 337 Tapas aims for magical power. Tapas is, so Shee, "primarily unrelated to
morality, ethics or religious-spiritual 'ideas of liberation.'338 The ascetic endeavor to be a
powerful man, not better man." And many written sources of Tantrism are mainly concerned
with Siddhi .339
As Tambiah claims, self-mortification is a persisting idea and practice in the religious life
of India. The world-renouncer who subjects himself to an ascetic regime has always in Hindu
and Buddhist societies attracted the admiration of the worldly laity. Moreover, asceticism has
been always associated with the acquisition of special powers even those of controlling nature
and of coercing the deities. Although the Buddha is said to have rejeted austere asceticism, he,
Tambiah asserts, does not appear to have denied the efficacy of a controlled, ascetic mode of
life, if not for all his disciples, at least for those disciples who were inclined in that direction.340

5.

Mimesis, Difference, Dharma and Karma

5.1. Karma and Channeling of Mimetic Desire

A stable hierarchy canalizes the mimetic desire because of a restriction on external
mediation and thus prevents imitation leading to conflict.341 The primitive religions, many
world religions and traditional cultures are shaped by the principle of hierarchy and social
differentiation (caste system in Hinduism; graded priestly caste and hierarchical bureaucracy in
the Inca empire, etc.) 342 The modern world, however, is characterized by increasing
competition, growing rivalry and increasing feelings of envy and jealousy. The traditional, antiegalitarian movements feel the potential danger of the disappearance of social differences and
therefore try to maintain the social differences.343
337

Adelheid Herrmann-Pfandt, Dknis. Zur Stellung und Symbolik des Weiblichen im Tantrischen Buddhismus
(Bonn: Indica et Tibetica Verlag 1992), 426.
338
Monika Shee, Tapas und tapasvin in den erzhlenden Partien des Mahbhrata (Studien zur Indologie und
Iranistik. Dissertationen Band I) (Reinbeck: Dr. Inge Wezler Verlag fr orientalistische Fachpublikationen, 1986), 396.
339
Teun Goudriaan, "Introduction, History and Philosophy," Hindu Tantrism, ed. Teun Goudriaan, Sanjukta Gupta,
and Dirk Jan Hoens (Leiden: EJ Brill, 1979), 7.
340
Tambiah, The Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets, 18.
341
Palaver, Ren Girards mimetische Theorie. Im Kontext kulturtheoretischer und gesellschaftspolitischer Fragen,
190.
342
Wolfgang Palaver, Gleichheit als Sprengkraft? Zum Einfluss des Christentums auf die Entwicklung der
Demokratie, in Jzef Niewiadomski (ed.), Verweigerte Mndigkeit? Politische Kultur und die Kirche (Thaur:
sterreicher Kulturverlag (= theologische trends 2), 1989), 209.
343
Palaver, Ren Girards mimetische Theorie. Im Kontext kulturtheoretischer und gesellschaftspolitischer Fragen,
91.

78

Karma, caste and dharma can be understood as mechanisms for the channeling of mimetic
rivalry in that sense.344 In Buddhism, the social hierarchy reflects only the "karmic hierarchy",
which is related to the cosmological hierarchy. One of the justifications of gender
discrimination in Buddhism had to do with the notion of karma, the belief that ones past acts
determine ones social position.345 Through the doctrine of karma - coupled with the doctrine of
reincarnation - the social status quo can be easily justified, since all the differences of power,
prestige and wealth will be declared as karma-determined.346
Buddhist ethic as the most world-rejecting ethic, for Weber, is rational, in the sense that it
produces a constantly alert control of all natural instinctive drives, though for purposes entirely
different from those of inner-worldly asceticism. Salvation is sought, not from sin and suffering
alone, but also from ephemeralness as such; escape from the wheel of karma-causality into
eternal rest is the goal pursued. This search is, and can only be, the highly individualized task
of a particular person (of world-renouncer). Rewards and punishments for every good and
every evil deed are automatically established by the karma-causality of the cosmic mechanism
of compensation. These chosen few (world-renouncer) are required to wander ceaselessly
except at the time of the heavy rains freed from all personal ties to family and world.
Buddhisms influence beyond the circle of the educated was due to the tremendous presitge
traditonally enjoyed by the world-renouncer, i.e., the ascetic, which possessed magical and
anthropolatric traits. At all events, Weber argues, no motivation toward a rational system for
the methodical control of life flowed from Buddhist. The existing order of the world was
provided absolutely unconditional justification, in terms of the mechanical operation of a
proportional retribution in the distribution of power and happiness to individuals on the basis of
their merits and failures in their earlier existences. No path, in Webers view, led from the
magical religiosity of the non-intellectual strata of Asia to a rational, methodical control of
life. 347
The cosmological hierarchy and dimension of Buddhism was often played down. As
Faure,348 following Tambiah, has persuasively argued, too often, in an approach typical of what
Tambiah calls the Pli Text Society spirit, scholars have attempted to interpret Buddhism as a
rationalist doctrine, a kind of Kantism avant la lettre. Buddhism, however, inherited from and
further developed Hindu cosmology. The cosmological hierarchy of the heavens where, owing
to their karma, human beings could eventually be reborn was represented as a hierarchy of the
states defined as the four dhynas which the practioner could reach in this very life through
344

Ren Girard, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture (London: Continuum, 2008), 240-1.
Bernard Faure, The Power of Denial. Buddhism, Purity and Gender (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003),
128.
346
Kng, Eine christliche Antwort, 499.
347
Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, Volume 2 (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1978), 627-30.
348
Bernard Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy. A Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism (Princeton: Princeton
University Press; 1991), 66.
345

79

meditation. Whether on the scale of one lifetime or of innumerable kalpas, it was a gradual
ascension during which the adept received help from all kinds of intermediary and mediating
figures: devas, Bodhisattvas, or followers of Mra.
Because of their social implications, the Karma doctrine was increasingly problematized and
critically considered by the Buddhist thinkers in Japan since1970. Linking the idea of selfacquired karma with the idea of the hereditability of karma led to the stigmatization of certain
groups (e.g. the so-called Burakumin) and "served/serves as justification for discrimination."349
The karma doctrine functioned, in conjunction with the belief in retribution for good and bad
karmic causation, as a kind of moral justification of social inequality. Differences in social
position, wealth and happiness of individuals was understood as a consequence of good or bad
behavior in this and previous lives that is completely independent of political or social
structures of the society. Viewed from this perspective, social inequality was not only just, but
an "expression of true equality." It also appeared completely plausible under this condition that
Buddhism protected society in which there were clear differences in social rank, since such a
society enabled only working off of old karma.350
The inescapable rolling karma causality corresponds to the eternity of the world, of life and,
above all, the caste system. Not only the caste of society, but also the gradation of divine,
human, animal beings of all ranks was derived from the principle of retaliatory measures of
work previously done. There is a "professional dharma" (Berufs-Dharma) for prostitutes,
robbers and thieves as well as kings and Brahmins.

351

The caste system is the most striking

characteristic of the Indian society, because it is insolubly connected with dharma, karma and
samsara. The castes are the earthly, social squad, in which karma balances itself. The current
position in society is achieved through their own deeds in previous lives and can be improved
by exact performance of duty or shortcomings in this or in a later life.352
In his paper, Buddhism: An Atheistic and Anti-Caste Religion? Modern Ideology and
Historical Reality of the Ancient Indian Bauddha Dharma, Edmund Weber argues that the
historian has to safeguard the strangeness of the past. Therefore, religio-historical research has
to scrutinize the reconstruction of the real history of religions by religious ideologies of the
present. Very often religious ideologies fall back to the past in order to get an alleged
legitimacy for their actual ambitions; however, for that purpose they have to model or falsify the
past according to their present ideological needs. One of the outstanding examples of such an
ideologisation of history of religion is, for Weber, the modern view of Buddhism. Developed
by the Western colonialist Indology this ideology portrayed and still is portraying Buddhism as
an rationalist-atheistic, anti-brahmanical, anti-caste and egalitarian religion. 353
349
350
351
352
353

Pye and Triplett, Streben nach Glck. Schicksalsdeutung und Lebensgestaltung in japanischen Religionen, 37.
Brian A. Victoria, Zen, Nationalismus und Krieg. Eine unheimliche Allianz (Berlin:Theseus Verlag, 1999), 239-40.
Weber, Gesammelte Aufstze zur Religionssoziologie II, Hinduismus und Buddhismus, 120, 142.
Jan Gonda, Die Religionen Indiens. Bd. I: Veda und lterer Hinduismus (Stuttgart u.a: Kohlhammer. 1978), 295-6.
Edmund Weber, Buddhism: An Atheistic and Anti-Caste Religion? Modern Ideology and Historical Reality of

80

Despite the successive relativization of the caste system in the world-renouncing soteriology,
this indifferentiation of caste difference in world-renunciation must not be misunderstood as
modern and emancipatory.354 Buddha himself did not attempt to attack or to reform the caste
system.355 To portray Buddha as a social reformer or socialist, is, according to Gombrich, "a
serious anachronism." He never preached against social inequality, only declared its irrelevance
to salvation. He neither tried to abolish the caste system nor to do away with slavery.356 He
never preached against social inequality. He tried not to abolish the caste system or to remove
remaining slavery. Buddha also accepted the reality of the Brahmanical social order including
the existence of the caste system.357 Buddha was not revolutionary in the Western sense. In all
of his fight against the arrogance of the Brahmin, he did not aim at overthrowing the social
order.358
The gradual organization of human race appeared Buddha, the "aristocrats" to be like a
"necessity of natural laws" and natural as the structure of living things beginning at the lowest
animals and humans and spirits leading up to the gods. Some Buddhist modernists go so far as
to say that the Buddha was against caste altogether: this is, for Gombrich, not the case, but is
one of the mistakes picked up from western authors. Most of the Buddhas sermons dealing
with caste are concerned with the problem, Who is the true brahmin? According to Gombrich,
some western interpreters have jumped too quickly to the conclusion that the Buddha
ethicized the concept of caste and argued against all such social distinctions. Gombrich argues
that Buddha did ethicize the concept, but Buddha did not argue against the continuing use of the
social distinction within its own context. Moreover, this ethicization is only half the story.
359

5.2. World-Renunciation as Undifferentiation of Caste Difference

The undifferentiating mixing of the caste differences within the Buddhist sagha a is
therefore not to be understood in the sense that the Buddha did not accept the caste system.
Buddha "was therefore not a democrat what the contemporary Indians want him to make," but
felt himself to be a member of the warrior aristocracy, from which, incidentally, also recruited

the Ancient Indian Bauddha Dharma, in Journal of Religious Culture / Journal fr Religionskultur No. 50 (2001), 1.
354
See also Weber, Gesammelte Aufstze zur Religionssoziologie II, Hinduismus und Buddhismus, 246.
355
Heinrich Dumoulin, Der Erleuchtungsweg des Zen im Buddhismus (Frankfurt am Main : Fischer-TaschenbuchVerlag, 1976), 311.
356
Gombrich, Theravada Buddhism: A Social History from Ancient Benares to Modern Colombo, 30.
357
tienne Lamotte, Der Buddha, Seine Lehre und Seine Gemeinde, in Der Buddhismus. Geschichte und
Gegenwart, ed. H. Bechert und R. Gombrich (Mnchen, C.H.Beck, 1984), 23.
358
Helmut von Glasenapp, Von Buddha zu Gandhi : Aufstze zur Geschichte der Religionen Indiens, ed. Volker
Moeller, Wilfrid Nlle [and] Joachim-Friedrich Sprockhoff (Wiesbaden : O. Harrassowitz, 1962), 18.
359
Gombrich, Precept and Practice, 295, 304.

81

the majority of his congregation.360

Gotama's attitude to the caste system was, according to Schumann, 361 conservative.
Although everyone could accept, even the untouchables, the Buddhist teaching, all caste
distinctions were abolished in Sagha , but Buddha considered caste difference outside the
community of world-renouncer as "natural". The karma, the actions of previous lives, cause the
people to be different in social status - "a classless society seemed to Buddha impossible." The
mixing of caste distinction in the festive group of world-renouncer is not to be understood as
democratic or emancipatory in the modern Western sense, but to be comprehended in the sense
of ritual indifferentiation. Mixing of caste distinction causes ritual impurity. The approval of all
castes to (world-renouncing) liberation is also found among Hindus. As Weber has rightly
pointed out, the recruitment of monks from all castes would have made them ritually impure
sect-caste."362 In Hinduism and Buddhism, impurity is mixing (Unreinheit ist Vermischung).363
Undifferentiating mixing of differentiated castes is impure and purity is defined as
differentiation. Not only Buddhism but also other Indian yogis have a system of open
recruitment, because of their Tantric contempt for purity regulations.364
The fact that the Buddhist monks are recruited from all castes can be understood against the
background of the "anti-structure of the renunciation of the world" in India as a sacred
reality.365A sacred institution of world-renunciation is a festive anti-structure that stands in
opposition to the caste society.366 Following Dumonts notion of world-renunciation in India,
Laidlaw has rightly pointed out a tempting misreading of the rejection of caste in renouncer
traditions.367 Only Westerners could mistakenly suppose that some sects of renouncers
would have tried to change the social order A famous passage compares the Sagha, in which
all caste distinctions have vanished, with the ocean in which the waters from the five great
rivers lose their identity.368 The festive and undifferentiating mixing and dissolving of caste
differences have little to do with social and political democratization. The loss of caste
differentiation in the community of world-renouncer can be comprehended as a festive, chaotic
and mixing undifferentiation (in the sense of Dionysian anti-structure).
In tantrism as well as in the case of world-renunciation, anti-caste statements should never
be read outside their ritual context. Returned into ordinary life, no high-caste Tantric would
think of breaking the social taboos. One might even argue that the predilection for contact
360

Helmut von Glasenapp, Brahma und Buddha. Die Religionen Indiens in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung
(Berlin: Deutsche Buchgemeinschaft, 1926), 200.
361
Schumann, Buddhismus. Stifer, Schulen und Systeme, 41.
362
Weber, Gesammelte Aufstze zur Religionssoziologie II, Hinduismus und Buddhismus, 116.
363
Axel Michaels, Der Hinduismus. Geschichte und Gegenwart (Mnchen: C. H. Beck, 1998), 360.
364
Van der Veer, Gods on Earth: Religious Experience and Identity in Ayodhya, 90.
365
Patrick Olivelle, The Origin and the Early Development of Buddhist Monarchism (Colombo: Gunasena, 1974), 4.
366
Dumont, Gesellschaft in Indien. Die Soziologie des Kastenwesens, 225.
367
James Laidlaw, Riches and Renunciation: Religion, Economy, and Society among the Jains (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1995), 115-6.
368
Zrcher, The Buddhist Conquest of China, 9 ; Thomas, The Life of Buddha as Legend and History, 128.

82

with low-caste people, especially women, in a ritual environment served to render the high-caste
practiser still more conscious of the violent breakthrough of his ordinary situation which he
had to make in order to proceed on the way to spiritual emancipation. Seen in this light, the
ritual egalitarianism of Tantrism in practice acted as a caste-confirming and class-confirming
force. One can compare the confirmatory and stabilizing role of festivals like Holi or
abarotsava, during which caste or class relaions are temporarily eliminated. There are on the
contrary many traces of caste distinction in the Tantric texts.369 These Dionysian and festive
undifferentiation of caste difference in the sacred institution and inTantrism should be
understood in the light of stabilizing mechanism of surrogate victim.
In his book The Origin and the Early Developement of Buddhist Monachism, Olivelle has
illuminated the anti-structutre of world renunciation in India as a sacred reality: In India,
(Dionysian) irruptions of the sacred were rare, if not absent, because the profane was based
directly on the absolute order (rta or dharma) thereby becoming itself sacred. The safety valve
for the permanence of this profane cum sacred order was its permanent denial and negation by
the institution of world renunciation. World-renouncer represented permanently the reversal
of values that takes place in other societies at times of sacred festivals as temporary irruptions.
The anti-structutre of world renunciation in India, therefore, was a sacred reality.370 The radical
world-renouncer Aghoris reversal is a life-long commitment rather than a temporary phase in
the annual round.371
World-renouncer stands "outside the caste system"372 that represents a higher order of
complexity. The loss of caste differentiation is related to the "homelessness without social
bonds"373 and to the social and civil death of world-renouncer (Totsein des Asketen).374 The
entry into the Sagha was carried out by the pravrajya (pli: pabbajj) ceremony, a simple act
that marked the "'going into homelessness,'" i.e., "withdrawal from the civic life."375 Those who
leave the village or from his usual habitat (loca), the world, were considered as dead.376 With
Sprockhoff, 377 Bronkhorst has rightly drawn attention to the fact that world-renouncer
(sanysin), though living in a biological sense, is dead to the world. Indeed, the ceremonies
that introduce him into this final state of life includes his symbolic cremationn.378 According
369

Goudriaan, "Introduction, History and Philosophy," 33.

Olivelle, The Origin and the Early Development of Buddhist Monarchism, 4.
371
Parry, Sacrificial Death and the Necrophagous Ascetic, 107.
372
Sprockhoff, Sanysa. Quellenstudien zur Askese im Hinduismus, 292.
373
Gombrich, Der Theravada-Buddhismus. Vom alten Indien bis zum modernen Sri Lanka, 57.
374
Sprockhoff, Sanysa. Quellenstudien zur Askese im Hinduismus, 292.
375
Helmuth von Glasenapp, Der Buddhismus in Indien und im Fernen Osten. Schicksale und Lebensformen einer
Erlsungsreligion (Berlin-Zrich: Atlantis Verlag. 1936), 40.
376
Sprockhoff, Sanysa. Quellenstudien zur Askese im Hinduismus, 292.
377
Joachim Friedrich Sprockhoff, Die Alten im alten Indien: ein Versuch nach brahmanischen Quellen, Saeculum
30 (1979), 374-433.
378
Johannes Bronkhorst, The Two Sources of Indian Asceticism (Schweizer Asiatische Studien. Monographien)
(Bern: Peter Lang, 1993), 28.
370

83

to Mooren, world-renouncer lives in the state of early death (im Zustand des vorgezogenen
Todes).379
Between the world-renouncer and the outcast, there are "a striking resemblance in some
respects.380 Buddhist world-renouncer (bhikkhu) became a classless or vanna-less person
and breaks through the fetters of society.381 Most of Buddhist yogins lived deliberately as
outcastes from society, rejecting its conventions and norms. And all distinctions are merged
into a single flavor and all divine forms are resolved into the person of the practicing
yogin.382 Differentiated system of world order are violently undifferentiated and merged in the
person of world-renouncing yogi as a microcosm. This violently undifferentiating crimes of
sacred and liminal world-renouncer could be best explained in terms of surrogate victim
mechanism. Tiresias stigmatizes Oedipus for his distinctive lack of distinctions. The Hindu
ascetic, who performs his own funerary rites at the time of his initiation, henceforth exists in the
world as a wandering ghost.383
Like all social distinctions, this system serves as means to channel mimetic rivalry and to
prevent the violence. Dumont384 has explained the festive and sacred institution of worldrenunciation against the background of the society in India and the sociology of the caste system.
Applying his "comparison principle: The Universal from an anthropological point of view,"385
the simple moralistic assessment of the traditional differentiation is to be avoided. The mimetic
reading of world-renunciation focuses less on the ethical assessment of the mechanisms, and
more on better knowledge of ourselves. For Dumont, the understanding of the caste system was
for the deep anthropological understanding of ourselves.386

5.3. Sacrificial Reading of Karmic Retribution

So far, karma and caste was understood in terms of hierarchical control of rivalry. Karma
and caste are seen as traditional forms of social differentiation used as traditional mechanisms of
channeling violence. The social distinction is used to prevent a future outbreak of a mimetic

379

Mooren, Die Vertauschten Schdel, 93.

David Shulman, Die Integration der hinduistischen Kultur durch die Brahmanen. Groe, mittlere und
kleine Versionen des Paraurma-Mythos, in Wolfgang Schluchter, ed., Max Webers Studie ber Hinduismus und
Buddhismus. Interpretation und Kritik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1984), 139.
381
Tambiah, World Conqueror and World Renouncer, 14.
382
David L. Snellgrove, Indo-Tibetan Buddhism. Indian Buddhists and Their Tibetan Successors (London: Serindia
Publications, 1987), 157.
383
Maurice Bloch and Jonathan Parry, Introduction: Death and the Regeneration of Life, in Maurice Bloch and
Jonathan Parry, ed., Death and the Regeneration of Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 13.
384
Dumont, Gesellschaft in Indien. Die Soziologie des Kastenwesens.
385
Dumont, Individualismus: Zur Ideologie der Moderne, 192.
386
Dumont, Gesellschaft in Indien. Die Soziologie des Kastenwesens, 17.
380

84

crisis. The hierarchical social models were for suppression of mimetic conflict.387 But the
mimetic theory doesnt defend the maintenance of social differences at any price.388 Founded
on the modern rejection of the idea of sacrifice, Girard critically considers the cultural systems
that resort to ritual, inner and outer victims for its stabilization.389
As Shinnick390 has analyzed, a hidden and transfigured form of "sacrificial principle" and
the "invisible victims" can be found in karma mechanism: For Shinnick, the ideas of
reincarnation, karma, and the caste system has to do with the mechanism hiding the invisible
victim. Reincarnation, karma, and the caste system could be seen as concealing a basic type of
violence and scapegoating in that they could be seen as functioning to justify the societal
practices of casting out and marginalizing certain people or groups of people. The karma will
convert the social order in a moral, in that the difference in the social rank was interpreted as
"just" retribution.391
The issue of "righteous" world government is solved in Buddhism by the theory of the
world-immanent of law of karma, which functions "automatic-mechanically. Here, the mythiccosmological dimension of the karma hierarchy is observed, which is readily compatible with
an "imperial interest" in legislation. Through the automatically karmic retribution mechanism,
law and order is legitimized as a cosmic justice and order. The cosmology of karma and sasra
comported well with an imperial interest in legislation; that is to say, law and order may be
reinforced by assenting to cosmic justice and order.392
Therefore, social differentiation is ontologized cosmic-mythologically. For example, genderbased discrimination is "naturalized" on the basis of karmic factors.393 Reincarnation as a
woman was considered a "karmic punishment."394 When Buddhists tried to explain and justify
their gender practices, they relied upon the pan-Indian and pre-Buddhist idea of karma,
interpreting this general statement regarding cause and effect into a claim that womens difficult
situations were the result of negative karma and previous misdeeds.395 The word for woman in
the Tibetan language means literally "low reincarnation." The traditional Buddhist attempts to
eliminate female birth, either in the next life, or, taken to an extreme, entirely, as in Amitabhas
Pure Land devoid of female rebirth.396 The female body was regarded as unclean in Buddhism
387

Palaver, Ren Girards mimetische Theorie, 313-4.

Ibid., 91.
389
Ibid., 296.
390
Julia W. Shinnick, "Hinduism and Mimetic Theory: A Response," in Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis,
and Culture 9.1 (2002), 143.
391
Lee, Buddhist Ideas and Rituals in Early India and Korea, 115-6; Edward Conze, Der Buddhismus. Wesen und
Entwicklung (Stuttgart-Berlin-Kln-Mainz: Verlag W. Kohlhammer, 1974), 68-9.
392
Matthew T. Kapstein, The Tibetan Assimilation of Buddhism: Conversion, Contestation, and Memory (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2000), 54.
393
Faure, The Power of Denial. Buddhism, Purity and Gender, 99.
394
Herrmann-Pfandt, Dknis. Zur Stellung und Symbolik des Weiblichen im Tantrischen Buddhismus, 76.
395
Gross, Buddhism After Patriarchy: A Feminist History: Analysis and Reconstruction of Buddhism, 210.
396
Gross, Buddhism After Patriarchy: A Feminist History: Analysis and Reconstruction of Buddhism, 210, 144.
388

85

and therefore the "self-hatred" was particularly common among Buddhist woman-renouncer. 397
The Buddhist texts recommend that an inevitable step in the effort to liberation for women is
a

male

reincarnation

or

(magical)

Geschlechtsverwandlung) in this life.

399

Buddhist texts.

398

sex

transformation

(eine

magische

Magical Sex change is witnessed in Mahayana

According to the theory of transformation of the body (kya-vivarta), a

woman can perform a sex change by the religious suicide: The Sarvastivadins regarded suicide
as a religious discipline, and stated the idea in their work, the Sutra Spoken by the Buddha on
the Girl Nagadatta. In this text it is said that the girl Nagadatta, in order to attain Buddhahood,
performs a religious suicide while practicing dharmaraksa. Before she jumps from a high
building to commit suicide, she says to herself that she will offer her body to the Buddha like
offering him flowers. The text says that it is only after having undergone such a discipline that
she is able to change her sex in the next life. The Vtspurtriyas upheld that if a woman has a
great initial religious commitment, such as the ability to generate bodhicitta or to perform a
religious suicide, as her foundation for practicing bodhisattvacary, she can definitely transform
her body or sex in a future life. 400
As shown earlier, one of the justifications of gender discrimination in Buddhism had to do
with the notion of karma, the belief that ones past acts determine ones social position. Thus,
the social hierarchy merely reflects the karmic hierarchy. 401 In view of the automaticalmechanical justice of karmic retribution, there is "no reason to complain". The protest against
the karmic justice, however, only produces bad karma. Present sufferings burn out or exhaust
the negative karma from the past. Not only are they told they are only reaping what they have
sowed and, therefore, have no basis for complaint. They can also be told that if they rebel
against the system, they are creating negative karma for themselves. 402 The prolonged
menstrual periods and other female diseases came to be seen as the result of a bad karma and a
sexual transgression, for instance, adultery.403 In karma mechanism but also the beauty of the
woman is usually considered as the result of a past sin. In a man, beauty is often perceived as
the effect of a good karma, whereas in a woman it is usually

5.4. Karmic Retribution and Magical Causality

In everyday language, karma simply means the mindless response to a disaster that has
397

Kleine, Sterben fr den Buddha, Sterben wie der Buddha. Zu Praxis und Begrndung ritueller Suizide im
ostasiatischen Buddhismus, 7-8.
398
Herrmann-Pfandt, Dknis. Zur Stellung und Symbolik des Weiblichen im Tantrischen Buddhismus, 8.
399
Gross, Buddhism After Patriarchy: A Feminist History: Analysis and Reconstruction of Buddhism, 67.
400
Cheng-mei Ku, A Ritual of Mahayana Vinaya:Self-Sacrifice, in David Kalupahana,ed.Buddhist Thought and
Ritual (New York:Paragon, 1991), 110, 166.
401
Faure, The Power of Denial. Buddhism, Purity and Gender, 128.
402
Gross, Buddhism After Patriarchy: A Feminist History: Analysis and Reconstruction of Buddhism, 143.
403
Faure, The Power of Denial. Buddhism, Purity and Gender, 71.

86

befallen a man perceived as a punishment, and that one has to endure as a result of past
trasngressions.404 The karma theory offered an explanation of social inequality and social
injustice. Accident and disease are to be "endured as penance for the mistakes made in a
previous life."405 By the endurance of punishment, karma is consumed. Through the enjoyment
of rewards or the suffering of punishment, old karma is used up.406 It was recently reported that
Tibetan peasants in southern India do not go to a doctor when they feel ill because they accept
their sickness as the inevitable result of their karma.407
The problem of bad karma from a previous birth is not unimportant.408 The karma doctrine
is also said that my current existence is the result of the actions of a previous existence, that my
physical and mental qualities, my position in life and my fate are determined by the karma of a
pre-existence. The theory of "metempsychosis" provides a "plausible" explanation of why one is
beautiful, elegant, rich and happy, the other is ugly, despised, poor and wretched. It offers only
the ability to endure the social inequality of the caste system.409 Karma in the Buddhist teaching
also plays an important role in the formation of mental attitudes and character traits. Thus ones
basic psychological make-up in relation to sexuality is determined: whether one is reborn as a
man, a woman or a hermaphrodite; as a lustful, virile, potent or impotent person. Moreover,
certain sexual proclivities are fixed (such as an incestuous desire), as are situational aspects
(such as getting married, or being rejected by all men).410
Dumoulin has rightly pointed out an impermissible extension of a causal nexus
(unzulssige Ausdehnung des Kausalnexus ) in the Buddhist karma causality: The law of karma
is evident for the Buddhist reality, but it appears to the Western thought strange and unlikely.
The acceptance of mutual influence of different factors, particularly a direct influence of the
moral actions into the physical realm appears to Dumoulin as an unlawful extension of the
causal nexus." In this Buddhist karmic causality, Dumoulin has seen a fantastic arbitrary game
with boundless times and spaces (ein phantastisches Willkrspiel), in which unverifiable
effects of past causes always occur.411
The karma theory offers, so Gombrich, an "untestable and irrefutable explanation" for
current conditions.412 Eliade has considered the karma-causality as an important example of
"magical-religious treatment of the 'disease'. For primitive man, there can be no present
"suffering" that would not be provoked." It is, so Eliade, a mistake that the person has
404

Von Brck and Lai, Buddhismus und Christentum. Geschichte, Konfrontation, Dialog, 406.
Gonda, Die Religionen Indiens. Bd. I: Veda und lterer Hinduismus, 350.
406
Hardy, The Religious Culture of India. Power, Love and Wisdom, 57.
407
A. Tom. Grundfeld, The Making of Modern Tibet (Delhi. Oxford University Press, 1987), 28.
408
Klaus Klostermaier, Der Hinduismus (Kln: Bachen, 1965), 188.
409
Von Glasenapp, Von Buddha zu Gandhi : Aufstze zur Geschichte der Religionen Indiens, 13-4.
410
Hardy, The Religious Culture of India. Power, Love and Wisdom, 242.
411
Heinrich Dumoulin, Der Religise Heilsweg des Zen-Buddhismus und die christliche Spiritualitt, in Studia
Missionalia XII. Buddhism. Edita a Facultate Missiologica in Pont. Universitate Gregoriana, Rom, 1962, 102.
412
Gombrich, Der Theravada-Buddhismus. Vom alten Indien bis zum modernen Sri Lanka, 56.
405

87

committed itself, or the malice of his neighbor. So the Indians have developed an idea of the
universal causality to carry the karma of the karmic debt. "413
For Girard, magical causality and mythology are same, both are related to witch-hunt414 : In
reality, however, magical thinking does not belong to the disinterested curiosity. Most often one
engages in the event of a disaster back to it. It is above all a "system of accusation . The role of
the magician is always playing the other, and his action is of course to harm his neighbors. The
magical thinking seeks "a significant cause on the level of social relationships", i.e. a human
being, a victim, a scapegoat. Gombrich/Obeyesekere has pointed out normal causation plus
witchcraft in the theory of karma that are believed in the contemporary Buddhist countries.
Many of these Buddhist people are living in a world in which they see few or no common-sense
explanations, no ordinary causation. Anything the least bit unusual is attributed to a supernatural
cause. They tend to ignore normal causation. One might even say that their world has become
de-rationalized.

415

People who appeal to karma in one context and witchcraft in another are after all reflective
persons.416 Witchcraft is the cause of this or that misfortune, but the fact that the witchcraft
happened, the fact that it worked, and the fact that its effects were thus and so, can only be
explained in terms of karma.417 Karma exists alongside other possible kinds of explanation of
otherwise unexplained events: notably
fate, angry or malevolent deities, ghosts, and
witchcrafts.418
Karmic causality means a causality of retribution (Vergeltungskausalitt der Tat ).419 The
doctrine of karma represents a doctrine of retribution (Vergeltungslehre). 420 Although the
produced karma is the result of his previous actions and the theory of karma is thus a "doctrine
of retribution," (Vergeltungslehre) it functions as autonomous powers automatically "on its own
inherent laws," mechanically, and with clockwork-like, Leibnizian inevitability. It functions as
"impersonal automatic." 421 Even the gods who also produce karma are subjected to the
automatic

mechanism
422

(Naturnotwendigkeit).

of

karma.

Karma

functions

like

"natural

necessity"

The idea of reincarnation is indissolubly connected with the belief that

413

Mircea Eliade, Kosmos und Geschichte. Der Mythos der ewigen Wiederkehr (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag,
1984), 107-112.
414
Girard, Der Sndenbock, 154, 79.
415
Richard Gombrich und Gananath Obeyesekere, Buddhism Transformed. Religious Change in Sri Lanka (Delhi,
Motilal Banarsidass: 1990), 63.
416
Laidlaw, Riches and Renunciation: Religion, Economy, and Society among the Jains, 68.
417
Ibid., 26.
418
Ibid., 65-6.
419
Von Glasenapp, Der Buddhismus in Indien und im Fernen Osten. Schicksale und Lebensformen einer
Erlsungsreligion, 110.
420
Gonda, Die Religionen Indiens. Bd. I: Veda und lterer Hinduismus, 207-8.
421
Wendy Doniger OFlaherty, Emotion und Karma. berlegungen zu Max Webers Interpretation der indischen
Theodizee, in Max Webers Studie ber Hinduismus und Buddhismus. Interpretation und Kritik, ed. Wolfgang
Schluchter (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), 89.
422
Klostermaier, Der Hinduismus, 188.

88

a legitimate, causally-conditioned and moral world order exists, which is characterized by the
karmic retribution (karmische Vergeltung) in the entire world events.423
In the idea of "absolute justice", which dominates the whole world process and any
individual life,424 the sacrificial nature and dimension of karma-mechanism can be perceived.
Karmic retribution can be read sacrificially. In Chapter 17 Retribution, Girard speaks of the
power of the idea of retribution: an essential aspect of every system of mythological
representation, which is entirely based on the mechanism of a victim. This is why belief in
retribution dominates primitive religion. This transcendent justice is, according to Girard, the
same as the scapegoating process. As our understanding of the victims function in the primitive
world grows, we shall be more able to penetrate the nature of human relationships in the
totalitarian world. For Girard, any society in which the scapegoat resumes his immemorial
role of founder and restorer of transcendence is totalitarian. This sacrificial and totalitarian
universe is a universe governed by infallible justice, a universe that is undoubtedly
atrocisously cruel. For Girard the demand for absolute perfection might well provide the
commond ground between the sacrificial society and modern totalitarian societies.

425

Buddhist karmic retribution (for example, Buddhas bad karma) could be also reread in the
light of Girardian understanding of the idea of retribution as an essential aspect of every system
of mythological representation. Budddhist universe of karmic retribution as a kind of the
absolute, too perfect and transcendent justice is to be understood as a sacrificial universe. The
well-oiled scapegoat mechanism generates an absolutely perfect world, since it
automatically assures the elimination of everything that passes for imperfect and makes
everything that is violently eliminated appear to be imperfect and unworthy of existence. There
is no room in this world for unpunished injustice or unsanctioned evil, any more that there is a
place for the just person who is unlucky or the persecuted person who is innocent..426
The automatic, perfect and mechanical functioning of karmic retribution appears to be like
this sacrificial world of absolute perfection. The karmic causality of retribution states that there
are no such thing as undeserved suffering.427 The solution of the karmic theodicy is "too
perfect": The original doctrine of karma solved the intellectual problem of evil, but the solution
was too perfect for emotional comfort, because it makes all suffering ones own fault.428
We can see the differentiating but sacrificial dimension of the karmic mechanism of
retribution. On the one hand, the doctrine of karma can be interpreted as a lesson for the
hierarchical control of mimetic rivalry for the (eternal-perfect) world order. On the other hand,

423

Gonda, Die Religionen Indiens. Bd. I: Veda und lterer Hinduismus, 350.
Von Glasenapp, Von Buddha zu Gandhi : Aufstze zur Geschichte der Religionen Indiens, 14.
425
Ren Girard, Job: The Victim of His People (London: Athlone Press, 1987), 118-23.
426
Girard, Job: The Victim of His People, 123.
427
Gombrich, Der Theravada-Buddhismus. Vom alten Indien bis zum modernen Sri Lanka, 78.
428
Gombrich, Merit Transference in Singhalese Buddhism: A Case Study of the Interaction between Doctrine and
Practice, 219.
424

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the internal and external scapegoats in the perfect, perfect, automatic, inevitable, and relentless
karmic mechanism of retaliation can be identified and found. Girard has noted the strong
tendency to attribute the imperfections of a society to internal and external scapegoats: The
mimetic tendency to attribute societys imperfection to reconciliatory scapegoats both within
and without is universal and transcultural but, instead of discouraging and denouncing it,
totalitarian societies, for Girard, foster and systematize it. They nourish with sacrificial
victims the myth of their own perfection, which they wish to promote.429
For iek, it is against this background that one should measure the radical difference
which, despite superfical resemblances, separates Christianity from Buddhism. Buddhism,
iek argues, remains indebted to the pagan notion of the Great Chain of Being. According to
Buddhism, we cannot escape the consequences of our past acts. That is the kernel of the
properly pagan tragic vision of life. This pagan notion, for iek, involves the short circuit, the
overlap between the ontological and ethical dimensions, best expressed in the Greek word
for causality (aita): to cause something also means to be guilty/responsible for it. But in the
case of Christianity, the separation between the ontological and the ethical dimensions has
taken place. iek argues that the properly dialectical paradox of paganism is that it
legitimatizes social hierarchy by reference to a notion of the universe in which all differences
are ultimately rendered worthless, in which every determinate being ultimately disintegrates into
the primordial Abyss out of which it emerged. According to Buddhism, iek asserts, we can
achieve liberation from our past deeds, but this liberation is possible only through radical
renunciation of (what we perceive as) reality, through liberating ourselves from the very
impetus/thriving (desire) that defines life, through extinguishing its spark and immersing
ourselves in the primordial Void of Nirvana, in the formless One-All. There is no liberation in
life, since in this life (and there is no other) we are always ensalved to the craving that defines
it. In contrast to Buddhism, Christianity, for iek, puts its wager on the possibility of the
radical Rupture, of breaking the Great Chain of Being, already in this life, while we are still
fully alive.430 From the point of view of Girardian hermeneutics of suspicion, we can discover
the mystified mechanism of founding victim in the world-renouncers radical renunciation of
reality through extinguishing desires spark and immersing himself in the primordial Void of
Nirvana, in the formless One-All.
According to Dumoulin, 431 Buddhist teaching concerning the karmic mechanism of
retribution and reincarnations has been strongly criticized by modernization efforts in recent
times. Modern Japanese Buddhists has questioned the idea of the cyclic reincarnation. The six
areas in the wheel of existence in which the creature can be reborn according to their karma, has
become the victim of "demystification" (Entmythologisierung). One can speak of a process of
429

Girard, Job: The Victim of His People, 123.

Slavoj iek, Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism? Five Interventions in the (Mis)use of a Notion (London: Verso,
2002), 52-4.
431
Dumoulin, Begegnung mit dem Buddhismus. Eine Einfhrung, 47.
430

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rationalization and "demystification"432of the karmic causality. Nevertheless, the belief in karma
in Asian Buddhism is very much alive: Religious fate-interpretation and influencing
(Schicksalsdeutung und beeinflussung) seems, despite the widespread acceptance of scientific
rationality, to enjoy great popularity. Schrimpf has treated the "karmic fate-understanding"
(karmisches Schicksalsverstndnis) in the Buddhist contemporary literature. There, fate is not
limited to the individual cycle of rebirths, but is seen as part of a family including the deceased
and the not-yet born members. The idea of family karma links the generations in mutual
dependence. Schrimpf has explained the practical implications of this concept through a
"drastic example:" clear: If someone is murdered, it means that one of his ancestors killed a man
in the four previous generations.433

II.
2.

World-Renunciation as Anti-structure and Reservoir of Creativity

World-Renunciation as Contained Chaos

1.1. World-Renunciation as Safety Valve

For Girard, any social distinction has the function to prevent future outbreak of mimetic
crisis. The traditional society as hierarchical social models was oriented to the suppression of
mimetic conflict.434 Inspired by Girard, Signer has analyzed two possible manners dealing with
the potential for violence: Human societies are in a constant state of stress and are characterized
by a constant - sometimes latent, sometimes overt - conflictuality. The traditional societies (the
"cold") try to prevent change or to deny. They suppress conflicts already in a much earlier stage.
The violence is thus less visible and daily life is characterized by numerous dampers, filters, and
redirections that are used to canalize conflicts as the streams in Switzerland in underground
channels, so that they cannot cause floods. So easily a false picture of traditional societies are
created and violence is banished in a surrealit which only the intelligence of the
imaginary can reach. Therefore, traditional societies has created, outwardly, the deceptive
impression of non-violence in their social coherence.435

432

Kritischer Geist, Rationalisierung, Entmythologisierung : Heinrich Dumoulin, Buddhismus im modernen

Japan, in Buddhismus der Gegenwart, ed.H. Dumoulin (Freiburg: Herder, 1970), 137.
433
Monika Schrimpf, Schicksalsdeutung und beeinflussung im japanischen Buddhismus der Gegenwart, in
Zeitschrift fr Religionswissenschaft 11, 2003, 45, 52-6.
434
Palaver, Ren Girards mimetische Theorie. Im Kontext kulturtheoretischer und gesellschaftspolitischer Fragen,
313-4.
435
David Signer, Die konomie der Hexerei oder Warum es in Afrika keine Wolkenkratzer gibt (Wuppertal: Peter
Hammer Verlag, 2004), 407-9.

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The "anti-structure of world-renunciation" as a "safety valve" for the Brahmanic order

436

can be interpreted as a filter and canalizing institution of mimetic conflictuality for the world
order. The Dionysian anti-structutre of world renunciation in India was a sacred reality,437
which represent festive and chaotic indifferentiation. For Girard, the sacred is the sum of human
assumptions resulting from collective transferences focused on a reconciliatory victim at the
conclusion of a mimetic crisis.438
Exploring Indian attitudes towards chaos, Hardy has penetrated deeper into mechanics of
antinomian attitudes including all kinds of Buddhism and religious madness: The chaos caused
by the (mimetic) passions and by delusion is an integral part of the mysterious cosmic order set
up by the Goddess. Chaos itself is provided with a religious dimension. There are certain
strands in the amorphous tantric traditions which illustrate a very similar approach. Hardy has
detected in Indian tendencies toward chaos a filtering system and counterbalancing factors
that introduces an element of order. We can interpret a general principle of containing chaos
in purely formal order which can be recognized on the grand scale of social structure in
traditional Indian society as means of containing and canalizing mimetic violence through
mechanism of reconciliatory victims. Indian society has a rather rigidly compartmentalized
structure, consisting of a large number of such compartments, for example the sacred and festive
institution of world-renunciation containing mimetic violence. Internal strife and (mimetic)
violence are not unknown, but could be contained within Indian culture.439 Especially worldrenouncing specialists of festive sacred seems, following Hardys insights, to play the
reconciliatory role of containing mimetic violence : ascetics brutal to themselves to the
extent of suicide through starvation; celibate mystics fainting in erotic ecstasy; thinkers
analyzing the world, the mechanics of human perception and thinking itself, down to the last
atom and the last vestige of ignorance; poets imposing the most rigid rationality on the
outrageously irrational, emotional and erotic this is the contained chaos.440
This Buddhist priority of choatic and forest disorder represented by the world-renouncing
specialists of the sacred could be illuminated by the Girards theory into order out of disorder.
Buddhist priority or even sacralization of (world-renouncers) chaotic nothingness and
nonduality should be read in terms of violent overcoming of chaos by the victimage mechanism.
In many myths the heroine or hero appears first as a symbol of disorder, then turns into a
symbol of order after being punished.441 According to Girard to recognize this priority of
chaos, because all myths started to minimize disorder from the very beginning and interpreted

436

Dumont, Gesellschaft in Indien. Die Soziologie des Kastenwesens, 320.

Olivelle, The Origin and the Early Development of Buddhist Monarchism, 4.
438
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 42.
439
Hardy, The Religious Culture of India. Power, Love and Wisdom, 539-41, 544-5.
440
Ibid., 552-3.
441
R. Girard, Disorder and Order in Mythology, ed. Disorder and Order: Proceedings of the Standford
International Symposium (Sept. 14-16, 1981), Standford Literature Studies 1(Saratoga: Anma Libri 1984), 81.
437

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the whole situation from the perspective of order. Most important is the paradox that all the
mythic heroes are presented as criminals who have broken a law that didnt really exist at that
particular moment because it was actually only established as the result of the punishment of the
hero. Like Girard, Carl Schmitt, according to Palaver, maintains the priority of chaos, out of
which order and law emerge. This insight into the priority of chaos is connected to their
common interest in Hobbes chaotic state of nature.442
Anti-structutre of world renunciation as a sacred reality has to be read in the light of the
Girards insights into the origin of the violent sacred, a phenomenon that is much too
common in human societies, and too closely implicated in cultural, social, and political events
and in the most concrete technical operations, to be dismissed as superstition or collective
neurosis, as positivism and psychoanalysis, respectively, have done. The psychological, moral
and social efficacy of the scapegoat is identical with its religious function, because its
mechanism becomes the perfect source of all social transcendence.443
Dumont's essay World Renunciaition in Indian Religions444 provides an important tool for
the analysis of the mechanisms of violence and the sacred in the Buddhist world-renunciation.
His analysis of the sociological dichotomy between the man-in-the-world and world-renouncer
in his homelessness and "exile"445 is fundamentally important for the social anthropological
understanding of Buddhism.446 In tracing the development of the belief system of sasarkarma-moka in Brahmanical thought, Collins447 argued, following Dumont, that the final
concretization of this conceptual world could only be understood in the light of a sociological
apperception of the dichotomy and reciprocity between the man-in-the-world and the worldrenouncer. In the Buddhist version of this conceptual world, the same dichotomy appears as that
between the layman and the ordained monk. It is this same dichotomy which is the fundamental
ideological structure on which are erected the psychological speculations which constitute the
doctrine of not-self, and the analyses of personality and continuity made in its light.

1.2. Representive of Reversal of Values during Festivals

Following Dumont, Gombrich has also paid attention to the whole series of binary
oppositions between man-in-the-world and world-renouncer. World-renouncer even tries to
442

Wolfgang Palaver, Order out of Chaos in the Theorie of Carl Schmitt and Ren Girard, in Synthesis. An
Interdisciplinary Journal. Chaos in the Humanities. 1/1 (1995), 96-99.
443
Girard, Job: The Victim of His People, 69-70.
444
Louis Dumont, World Renunciation in Indian Religions, Contributions to Indian. Sociology 4 (1960), 33-62.
445
Shee, Tapas und Tapasvin in den erzhlenden Partien des Mahbhrata, 316.
446
Collins, Selfless Persons: Imagery and Thought in Theravada Buddhism, 65, 264; Gombrich, Der TheravadaBuddhismus. Vom alten Indien bis zum modernen Sri Lanka, 57; Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights. An
Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition, 257.
447
Collins, Selfless Persons: Imagery and Thought in Theravada Buddhism, 65.

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"give up ordinary perception and thought processes". The Buddha joined this sacred worldrenunciation which rejected the traditional institutions of society and he reached the Great
World-renunciation. 448 The fundamental social dichotomy between layman and worldrenouncing monk, between the man-in-the-world living in his house, and world-renouncer
oriented towards homelessness in every sense, which has been the institution on which the
psychological and ontological dichotomy of sasra and nirva has rested.449 The most
striking concomitant in Indian society is that there exists in the society of caste itself, and
alongside the caste system, an institution which contradicts it. By world-renunciation, a man can
become dead to the social world, escape the network of strict interdependence. Worldrenouncer is cut off from the social life and symbolically dies to the world.450
Buddhist world order arise from an extreme, chaotic and Dionysian disorder represented by
the sacred and festive institution of world-renunciation and its specialists of the sacred. LviStrauss, Girard argues, believes that the aim of ritual is to achieve undifferentiation for its own
sake. But this is far from being the case. The (sacrificial) crisis is seen simply as a means to
assure differentiation. There is no reason whatsoever to consign all rituals to the realm of
nonsense, as Lvi-Strauss does. In Girards view, order in human culture certainly does arise
from an extreme of disorder, for such disorder is the disappearance of any and all contested
objects in the midst of conflict, and it is at such a point that acquisitive mimesis is transformed
into conflictual mimesis and tends toward the unification of conflict against an adversay.451
For Dumont, it may be wondered this complementariy between caste and renunciation
does not in some manner replace the complementarity of the pure and the impure. In other
words, only the presence of world-renouncers can preserve the men-in-the-world from
impurity.452 Shulman453 has maintained that there is a striking resemblance in many respects
between world-renouncer and outcast. For Dumont, it can be seen that specialization in
impurity at least, if not the caste system such as exists these days, is recorded from the
beginning of our era. The Cala is relegated to cremation grounds and lives on mens refuse.
It is specialization in impure tasks, in practice or in theory, which leads to the attribution of a
massive and permanent impurity to some categories of people.

454

In this context, we can assume world-renouncers role in specialization and canalization of

448

Gombrich, Der Theravada-Buddhismus. Vom alten Indien bis zum modernen Sri Lanka, 57.
Collins, Selfless Persons: Imagery and Thought in Theravada Buddhism, 264.
450
Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications (Chicago: University of
Press, 1970), 184-5.
451
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 28-9.
452
Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications (Chicago: University of
Press, 1980), 191.
Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications, 191.
453
Shulman, Die Integration der hinduistischen Kultur durch die Brahmanen. Groe, mittlere und
Versionen des Paraurma-Mythos, 139.
454
Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications (Chicago: University of
Press, 1980), 52, 47.
449

94

Chicago

Chicago

kleine
Chicago

violent Dionysian undifferentiation and ritually impure tasks and things. From the fourteenth
century onward, Zen became, according to Faure, increasingly concerned with death rituals
to the point of becoming a major trend of so-called funerary Buddhism. The advocates of
pure Zen came to be regarded as specialists of impurity.455 One of the main functions of
Buddhist monks in Tibetan society, as in other Buddhist societies, was to become the
performance of funerary ritual.456 World-renouncers have placed themselves outside society.
Buddhist world-renouncer placed themselves outside ordinary society in formal terms, however
closely they might in fact interact with it subsequently. In practice, there was an ongoing
dialectic between forms of renunciate practice that became more or less assimilated to the needs
of society, and others that positioned themselves at the edges or outside society. The early
willingness to take over the cult of dead spirits in marginal places outside the cities suggests
that Buddhists initially occupied a somewhat similar role. Perhaps the most important role of
Buddhist monks in many parts of the Buddhist world remains that of dealing with death.457
Dumont has raised the question as to whether the caste system could have existed and
endured independently of its contradictory, world-renunciation.458 It teaches us, for Dumont,
something fundamental, namely that hierarchy in actual fact culminated in its contrary, worldrenouncer.459 The culmination of the caste hierarchy in the world- renouncer, is seen as one of
Dumonts most brilliant insights, and will continue to stimulate further investigations,460
especially in the light of mimetic theory. In this regard, we can postulate the generating and
differentiating role of world-renouncer for the world order. Paradoxically the festive and
Dionysian anti-structure of world-renunciation and its specialists of the festive sacred (worldrenouncer) have played the structuring role for world order. Girard sees in the scapegoat
mechanism the process that gives structure to society. The scapegoat mechanism differentiates
and produces the original differences. The mechanism of collective violence differentiates the
victim as guilty, makes him the sole culprit among all his mimetic doubles.461

1.3. World-Renouncer as a Field of Merit

455

Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy. A Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism , 179. See Chapter 9. The
Ritualization of Death (179-207).
456
Samuel, Civilized Shamans. Buddhism in Tibetan Societies, 447.
457
Geoffrey Samuel, The Origins of Yoga and Tantra: Indic Religions to the Thirteenth Century (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2008), 239, n. 15.
458
Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1970), 186.
459
Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1980), 194.
460
Pauline Kolenda, "Seven Kinds of Hierarchy in Homo Hierarchicus," Journal of Asian Studies 35, 4 (1976), 594.
461
Girard, Job: The Victim of His People, 104.

95

There were certain latent dialectical tensions, if not contradictions, as well as

reciprocities and dialectic between Buddhist world-renunciation and Buddhist world order.
Kingship as the crux of order in society provides the conditions and the context for the survival
of Buddhist world-renunciation. They need each other: Buddhist world-renouncer in being
supported by an ordered and prosperous society is able to act as the field of merit in which
merit making can be enancted and its fruits enjoyed, while the worldly king as the foremost
merit maker needs the Buddhist world-renouncer to make and realize his merit and fulfill his
kingship.462 The Buddhas and Buddhist community of world-renouncer, as a field of merit,
offered a mechanism for the improvement of karma which could be found in extreme giving
of bodhisattvas and their transfer of merit to believers. The concept of the transfer of merit
from Bodhisattvas to believers also promoted an economic logic in Buddhist practice.463
One of the most important characteristics of the role of Buddhist monk from an economic
point of view is the position of Buddhist world-renouncer as a vehicle for merit-making
activities on the part of the layman. The monk performs this function through the ritual receipt
of merit-offerings. A simple illustration is seen in the daily offering of rice to the monks.
According to this Buddhist economic of merit making, the monks make a daily morning
circuit of the village each household an opportunity to earn merit by the ritual contribution to
the alms bowls of the monks. This ritual feeding of the Sangha also takes place on almost
every important occasion whether birth, marriage, death, or national holiday.464 This violently
reciprocal mechanism of transfer could be illuminated by Girardian principle of metamorphosis
around or against the victim. The victim is the catalyst who converts sterile, infectious violence
into positive cultural values. The victim might be compared to the factories that convert
household refuse into fertilizer.465
Dumont has drawn our attention to the unique character of world-renunciation in India. In
his essay A Definition of World Renunciation, Olivelle has pointed out the negative and negating
definition and dimension of world-renounciation. World-renunciation is a negative state and a
denial of all that makes society what it is. Being an anti-structure to the established society, it is
defined not by what it is, but by its rejection of the social structures. World-renunciation is
essentially a negative state constituting an anti-structure to the life-in-the-world. The true
significance of the positive elements of the world-renouncers life can only be understood by
identifying their negative and negating dimension. This negation of the life-in-the-world is
central to the goal of world-renunciation. World-renunciation represented an anti-structure to
the society of that time, a total rejection and the reversal of the value system of the world. A
world-renouncer should eat food that is begged. This indicates that a world-renouncer should
462

Tambiah, World Conqueror and World Renouncer, 41.

Ruppert, Jewel in the Asches. Buddha Relics and Power in Early Medieval Japan, 26, 28.
464
David E. Pfanner and Jasper Ingersoll, Theravada Buddhism and Village Economic Behavior. A Burmese and
Thai Comparison, in The Journal of Asian Studies. 21/3 (1962), 344-7.
465
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 107.
463

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not eat any food that is not begged. World-renunciation is basically an is not rather than an is.
As far as renunciation is concerned, none of these practices are significant in themselves. Their
significance lies in the fact that they constitute the negation of other practices typical of life-inthe-world. What is truly significant is not what a renouncer does, but rather what he implicitly
refuses to do by the very fact of doing what he does.466 According to Vinaya rules, Buddhist
world-renouncers were not allowed to cook for themselves.467
"Negativism pervading the whole Buddhism"468 and "negativism driven to the extreme"
(der auf die Spitze getriebene Negativismus) in Mahyna Buddhism469 can be best explained
against this negativistic dharma of world-renouncer. The "anti-human nature" and the "total
opposition to the life" in all the physiological and mental techniques of yoga470

represent an

anti-structure: the yogin "refuses to 'be alive." All yogic techniques perform exactly the
"opposite" to which human nature compels us.471 "A purely negative 'enlightenment'"472 has to
be understood in this light of world-renouncers negative or world-negating soteriology.
I seek to explicate the "anti-intellectualism of the Ch'an (Zen)"473 and "anti-logic" of the
kan 474 in terms of social anthropologically specific world-renouncing and life-negating
dharma and logic of world-renouncer. "Anti-analogical non-ontology " (anti-analogische NichtOntologie ) and "anti-conceptualism of nothingness " (Anti-Konzeptualismus des Nichts )475
represents the anti-structural, festive and sacrificial logic imposed on world-renouncer. The
sacred anti-structural institution of world-renunciation could be thought of as a kind of
"contained chaos"

and "the contained violence." 476 This festive institution of world-

renunciation seems to be an institution to contain violence.477

Girards cultural theory sheds new light on the violent paradox surrounding the positive
valuation of chaotic and Dionysian structure and institution (world-renunciation). Falk
illustrates instances in India where conditions of a chaotic structure have been given a
positive valuation. World-renouncing ascetics, for example, sought a primal reality that is

466

Patrick Olivelle, "A Definition of World Renunciation," in Wiener Zeitschrift fr die Kunde Sdasiens 19 (1975),
75, 82-3.
467
Petra Kieffer-Plz, Die buddhistische Gemeinde, in Der Buddhismus I. Der indische Buddhismus und seine
Verzweigungen (Religionen der Menschheit) (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 2000), 346.
468
Dumoulin, stliche Meditation und christliche Mystik, 29.
469
Helmuth von Glasenapp, Die Literaturen Indiens. Von ihren Anfngen bis zur Gegenwart (Stuttgart: Krner 1961),
178.
470
Mircea Eliade, Yoga. Unsterblichkeit und Freiheit (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1988), 105.
471
Ibid.; Dumoulin, stliche Meditation und christliche Mystik, 74.
472
Ibid., 115.
473
Von Brck and Lai, Buddhismus und Christentum. Geschichte, Konfrontation, Dialog, 125.
474
Schumann, Buddhismus. Stifer, Schulen und Systeme, 202.
475
Von Brck and Lai, Buddhismus und Christentum. Geschichte, Konfrontation, Dialog, 417, 430.
476
Hardy, The Religious Culture of India. Power, Love and Wisdom, 553, 106.
477
dinstitution destine contenir la violence (Lucien Scubla, Contribution la thorie du sacrifice, in Ren
Girard et le problme du mal, ed. M. Deguy and J. P. Dupuy (Paris: Grasset, 1982), 141.

97

prior to form and order. World-renouncer chose to seek it in the chaotic wilderness.478 The
world-renouncing ascetics had to break with the world to seek their special modes of chaos.
Girards theory genetic mechanism of structural forms is helpful for making sense of cultural
paradox of Buddhist world order rooted in Dionysian anti-sructure of sacred world-renunciation.
This mechanism that produces culture is paradoxical from the standpoint of established
perspectives, being essentially rooted in the delusions of unanimous victimage.479

1.4. World-Renouncer and Dionysiac Undifferentiation

Dumont provides insights into the specialization of Dionysian reversal of values during
festivals: What is characteristic of the Indian order, with a division of labor based upon the
fundamental religious values, is a complete differentiation between the spiritual and the
temporal. This allows society, in relegating the temporal to a subordinate position, and in
contra-distinction to simpler societies, to found itself directly upon the absolute order. Since this
is the case, naturally we find neither reciprocal alternation in the handling of impurity, in
essentials the business of specialists, nor a complete reversal of values during festivals.
Dumont goes so far as to say that even the latter is replaced by a division of labour. For in fact,
the everyday order, which becomes here the permanent order in the world, is in effect relativised,
but only in the values of the samnyasi.480
The festive values of the (radical) world-renouncer has to be thought of as representing
Dionysiac nondifferentiation. Seeing the conflictual symmetry behind the mythological
message, Girard argues that becchanal perpetuates an essential aspect of the sacrificial crisis: the
destruction of differences. Beginning as a gesture of harmony, the Dionysiac elimination of
distinctions rapidly degenerates into a particularly virulent form of the violent
nondifferentiation. The abolishment of sexual differences, which appears in the ritual
bacchanal as a celebration of love and brotherhood, becomes in the tragedy an act of hostility.481
For Dumont, in world-renouncer, as the extramundane individual, a special kind of
sacredness is reserved. With his negation of the world and his asceticism, he represents that
very reversal of values which we expected to find in festivals. Put in another way we could say
that he is the safety valve for the Brahmanic order, which can give a permanent place to the
transcendent, while remaining out of the range of its attacks. By means of this compromise the
478

Nancy E. Falk, Wilderness and Kingship in Ancient South Asia, in History of Religions 13/1 (1973), 14.
Ren Girard, "To Double Business Bound": Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins UP, 1988), xiv.
480
Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1980), 278-9.
481
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 127-37.
479

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Brahman rules over the world in peace, as a rather monotonous immanence.482 From the
viewpoint of mimetic theory, we could say that world-renouncer representing the festive and
Dionysian reversal of values in his special kind of (violent) sacredness played the role of
reconciliatory victims (safety valve) for the world order. Violent death of the reconciliatory
victim "supplies the people with valve that is needed to recover the calmness."483 Forms of
human sociality, unlike animal forms, cannot develop directly out of mimetic rivalries, but they
do develop indirectly from them through the intermediary of the surrogate victim.
World-renouncers special kind of sacredness can be understood from the perspective of
Girards Violence and the Sacred. Liminality of sacred world-renouncer seems to be related with
the

ambiguity of the sacred (sacer) in Latin, consecrated to the gods or carrying an

ineffaceable defilement, august or accursed, something worthy of veneration or that arouses

horror. This ambivalence opposes sacred (sacer) to holy (sanctus), understood to result
from a human sanction imposed by law. A man condemed to death was as sacer as a sacrificial
victim, but he was not hieros.484 Buddhist world-renouncer belongs to the sacred rather than to
the holy. Cuttat has rightly pointed out this essential difference between the sacred and the holy
(see Das Sakrale und das Heilige, 65-8).

485

Yogi remains in the border area of the sacred (im Grenzbereich des Sakralen ). For Cuttat,
the coincidence of the opposites of the East is of a different kind. It reveals sacrality. The
sacred (das Sakrale), Cuttat argues, means the numinous and mysterium tremendum et fascinans
that Rudolf Otto, who calls it, however unjustly, das Heilige, so aptly describes.486 The special
sacredness, the numinous and mysterium tremendum et fascinans surrounding forest worldrenouncing Buddhas can be illuminated in the light of Girards theory. Girard claims that in an
attempt to make the mystery of violence and the sacred, of the sovereign victim and the
sacrificial king, acceptable, Rudolf Otto proposes his famous concept of the numinous.487
Buddhist world-renunciation embodied the reversal of values that the sacred implies, and
represents in a permanent fashion the wholly other and totally different that is the essential
characteristic of the numinous.

488

World-renouncer seems to represent and to specialize mimetic crisis expected in festivals. In

Chapter 5 Dionysus, Girard has analyzed Dionysian character of festivals involving the
deliberate violation of established laws. (Tantric) celebrations in which sexual promiscuity is
482

Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1980), 279.
483
Ren Girard, Das Heilige und die Gewalt (Zrich: Benzinger, 1987), 195.
484
Bernard Faure, Double Exposure: Cutting Across Buddhist and Western Discourses, translated by Janet Lloyd.
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 71.
485
Jacques Albert Cuttat, Asiatische Gottheit christlicher Gott. Die Spiritualitt der beiden Hemisphren,
translated by Hans Urs von Balthasar ( Freiburg:Johannes Verlag Einsiedeln, 1965).
486
Ibid., 65-8.
487
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 67.
488
Patrick Olivelle, The Origin and the Early Development of Buddhist Monachism (Colombo : M. D. Gunasena,
1974), 86.

99

not only tolerated but prescribed or in which incest becomes the required practice. For Girard,
such violations must be viewed in their broadest context: that of the overall elimination and
destruction of differences. Girard argues that these festivities commemorate a sacrificial crisis,
the term with which he characterizes the breakdown of the social and cultural order. Festivals
are based on the assumption that there is a direct link between the sacrificial crisis and its
resolution.489
The fundamental purpose of the festival is to set the stage for a sacrificial act that marks at
once the climax and the termination of the festivities. If the crisis brought on by the loss of
distinctions and the subsequent advent of reciprocal violence can be celebrated in such a
jubilant fashion, it is because these holocausts are seen in retrospect as the initial stages of a
cathartic process. The beneficial character of the generative unanimity tends to be projected
onto the past, affecting the initial impression of the crisis and making it seem other than it was.
The violent dismissal of distinctions now acquires a favorable connotation, which will
eventually manifest itself as a festive display. For example, ritual incest ultimately acquires a
beneficial aspect that seems to be almost wholly independent of its sacrificial quality. In
festivals in which the monarch plays no direct role we encounter a substitute king sometimes a
king of fools who is himself nothing more than a sacrificial victim endowed with sacral
privileges; at the conclusion of the festivities, he or his representative will be sacrificed. Girard
asserts that the kings sovereignty real or imagined, permanent or temporary seems to derive
from an original, generative act of violence inflicted on a surrogate victim.490 We can find
evolutionary transformation of the festival in Indian civilization that are specialized in festive
institution of world-renunciation and world-renouncer. In its ultimate consequences, worldrenunciation threatens to explode the society. Understandably, world-renunciation, despite its
transcendent prestige, ever met a damped but persistent hostility. "491
World-renunciation as a safety valve seems to represent sacrificial protection and sacred
protection-mechanism.492 Behind all material concerning world-renouncing ascetics with its
implicit tendencies towards chaos, Hardy493detected counterbalancing factors that introduces
an element of order, which can be interpreted as a largely unconscious scapegoat mechanism
working in the foundation of human civilization. World-renunciation is the counter-andbalancing-institution to caste.494 World-renunciation is "a social condition in the margins of
489

Ren Girard, Violence and the Sacred (New York/London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005), 127,
129.
490
Ren Girard, Violence and the Sacred. Translated by Patrick Gregory (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1977), 119-20.
491
Jan C. Heesterman, Kaste und Karma. Max Webers Analyse der indischen Sozialstruktur, in Max Webers Studie
ber Hinduismus und Buddhismus. Interpretation und Kritik, ed. Wolfgang Schluchter (Frankfurt am Main:
Suhrkamp, 1984), 79.
492
Ren Girard, Ich sah den Satan vom Himmel fallen wie einen Blitz (Mnchen Carl Hanser Verlag, 2002), 229.
493
Hardy, The Religious Culture of India. Power, Love and Wisdom, 541.
494
Kolenda, "Seven Kinds of Hierarchy in Homo Hierarchicus," 593.

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proper society."495 World-renouncer gives away his possessions and lose any claim to the
family property, he "sucks sacrificial fire into himself" and dont burn sacrificial fire any more,
he takes his own funeral rites. His death causes no impurities for his family.496 World-renouncer
takes the sacrificial fire in his body (Agnisamropaa, die Aufnahme des Feuers in sein Selbst).
497

According to a widespread belief, Indian Buddhism may be defined by its trenchant

rejection of Vedic ritual. But in truth, as Faure rightly points out, it is not particularly original in
this respect. A Hindu ascetic is one who has extinguished his fires and so no longer practices
the ritual involving dometic fire. Instead, as the Indianist Charles Malamoud has shown, he has
cooked himself, consumed his passions and offered himself up for sacrifice. What is involved
here is thus an internalization of sacrifice, rather than a negation, it is a rejection of external
sacrifices in favor of internal sacrifice in the fire of consciousness. The same procedure, for
Faure, characterizes a Buddhist renuncer, in particular, a devotee of Tantrism. Where some
observes fancy they detect a rationalist critique of Vedic ritualism, Faure instead sees a
sublimation of it.498

2. World Renouncer, World Conqueror and the Founding Victim

2.1. Mechanism between World-Renunciation and World Order
Violent paradox of civilizing and creative role of world-renouncer could be explained from
the viewpoint of mechanism that produces the differentiated, symbolic, and human forms of
culture through the intermediary of the surrogate victim: Hinduism, the religion of caste system
and word-renunciation, has developed by integrating in Brahmanism and by tolerating in
the sects the products of the world- renouncers thought and mysticism. The most important
aspect, according to Dumont, is the addition to group religion of individual religion, even in
Tantrism which in place of world-renunciation introduced, as a fundamental variation and
according to an elementary formula, the sacred reversal.499
In this sense, sacred anti-structure world-renunciation functions not only as safety valve for
the world order, but also as a reservoir of creativity. World-renunciation is the counter-andbalancing-institution to caste. Though the world-renouncer is outside of the caste system, he is
495

Dumont, Gesellschaft in Indien. Die Soziologie des Kastenwesens, 315.

Ibid., 315, n. 18.
497
Sprockhoff, Sanysa - Quellenstudien zur Askese im Hinduismus, 40.
498
Faure, Double Exposure: Cutting Across Buddhist and Western Discourses, 72.
499
Louis Dumont, Religion/Politics and History in India. Collected Papers in Indian Sociology (Paris/The Hague:
Mouton Publihsers, 1970), 59.
496

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not outside of society, for he teaches or conveys his ideas to ordinary caste-regulated people. In
fact, it is Dumonts view that it has been world-renouncers, rather than Brahmans, who have
been the creative agents in Hinduism, their new ideas being absorbed into Hinduism and into
the ideology of the caste system. As prime examples of the influence of world-renouncers upon
caste, the imitation by Brahmans of the vegetarianism and non-violence of Buddhist and Jain
renouncers could be cited.500 World-renouncer as creative agents could be understood as the
surrogate victim as the founding agent in all religion and culture.501
Seldom, as Gold502 has argued, do analysts of Indian culture view the institution of worldrenunciation as a drain or detriment to the functional stability of Hindu society. Dumont treats
it, in juxtaposition to caste-bound social organization, as a kind of safety valve releasing
disaffected elements or still more positively as a reservoir of creativity. Dumont dares to say
that the (creative) agent of development in Indian religion and speculation, the creator of
values, has been the world-renouncer.503World-renouncer is responsible for all the innovations
in religion that India has seen.504
In spite of the universal viewed anthropologically505 between Indian tradition of worldrenunciation and Christian traditions of renunciation, we should not forget or downplay a
specifically Indian dialetic. When world-renouncer looks back at the social world, he sees it
from a distance, as something devoid of reality, and the discovery of the self is for him
coterminous, as described by Dumont, not with salvation in the Christian sense, but with
liberation from the fetters of life as commonly experienced in this world. The worldrenouncer is self-sufficient, concerned only with himself. His thought is, for Dumont, similar to
that of the modern individual, but for one basic difference: we live in the social world, worldrenouncer as an outworldly individual lives outside it. Drawing full attention to this strange
creature and its characteristic relation to society, Dumont has pointed out, in spite of similarity
with Western anchorites and between Buddhist and Christian monasteries, the yawning gap
between the world-renouncer on the one hand and the social world and the individual-in-theworld on the other. As Dumont has maintained, only Westerners could mistakenly suppose that
some sects of world-renouncers would have tried to change the social world. The interaction
with the social world took other forms in Indian context. World-renouncer depends on that
world for his subsistence, and would instruct the man-in-the-world. Short of joining the worldrenouncing congregation, the layman-in-the-world is taught only a relative ethic: to be
500

Kolenda, "Seven Kinds of Hierarchy in Homo Hierarchicus," 593.

Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 138.
502
Ann Grodzins Gold, The Once and Future Yogi: Sentiments and Signs in the Tale of a Renouncer-King, in
The Journal of Asian Studies 48, no. 4 (November 1989), 772.
503
Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1980), 275.
504
Louis Dumont, Essays on Individualism: Modern Ideology in Anthropological Perspective (Chicago: Uuniversity
of Chicago press, 1992), 25.
505
Ibid., 181.
501

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generous towards the monks and to avoid deleterious and self-abasing actions. What no Indian
religion has ever fully attained and which was given from the start in Christianity is, for Dumont,
the brotherhood of love in and through Christ and the consequent equality of all.

506

I attempt to read this specifically Indian dialetic between sacred-liminal forest worldrenouncer and worldly householder in his village from the viewpoint of the Girardian surrogate
victim mechanism. In Paul Muss opinion, scholars who see a problem posed by Buddha
kyamunis answer to metaphysical questions create their own difficulties by trying to solve it
philosophically. The seeming incongruity between metaphyiscal questions put to the Buddha
and his practical response is resolved when taken from a purely philosophical context and
placed into historical perspective. Mus, as Urubshurow argues, that Buddhas practical answer
to a metaphysical question makes sense as a moment in the thought of India. Mus insists that
Buddhism developed as a dynamic part of an integrated world view, which he calls Total
India. To understand this axial view, one must take account of concrete ethnographic realities,
and not exaggerate the importance of doctrinal analysis.

507

Mus claims that scholars of Indian religions have generally misunderstood Buddhas
silence, and other matters, due to an excessive use of philosophical hermeneutics. As a
corrective measure, he stresses the cardinal importance of art and ritual in the development of
religious traditions. Buddhism is a problem of history, not of philosophy508; and problems
posed by Buddhas teachings are soluble not by pure logic, but by the logic of history.509 Mus
faults interpretations that force contemporary philosophical notions onto an ancient mentality:
LInde la produit, lInde lexpliquera.510 To render Buddhist thought intelligible, one must
take account of the Brhmaas, which exhibit a cultural pattern logically consistent with all
subsequent religious developments in India. Total India is first embodied in the Brhmaas,
and epitomized in the fire sacrifice (agnicayana). Buddhism, Jainism, and Hinduism exist in a
lateral relationship, and are subordinate to Total India.511 Buddhism and Buddhist philosophy
should be understood in the light of this specifically Indian dialetic and logic (of worldrenunciation).
For Girard, the Passion of Christ unveiled the sacrificial origin of humanity once and for
all. It dismantled the sacred and revealed its violence. However, Christ also confirmed the
divine that is within all religions. According to Girard, the incredible paradox, which no one
can accept, is that the Passion has freed violence at the same time as holiness.512 Because the
506

Ibid., 25-31.
Mus, Barabudur - Esquisse D'Une Histoire Du Bouddhisme Fondee Sur LA Critique Archeologique Des Textes,
254, 71.
508
Ibid., 135..
509
Ibid., 192.
510
Le bouddhisme est un produit de la pense indienneLInde la produit, lInde lexpliquera (ibid., 50).
511
Victoria Urubshurow, Transformation of Religious Symbol in Indian Buddhism: Reflecitons on Method From a
Reading of Muss Barabuur, in Numen 35 (1988), 261-4.
512
Ren Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoit Chantre (Michigan State University Press, 2010), xi.
507

103

Passion of Christ reproduces the founding event of all rituals, it is connected with every ritual
on the entire planet. Therefore the incredible paradox of essential difference and structural
similarity between apocalpytic Christ and sacrificial (world-renouncing) Buddhas should be
taken into account.
Faure513 tries to question the ideological implications of world-renouncers obligation
to be free or desire to be free from the bonds of society. We dare to question sacrificial
implication surrounding this obligation of strange creature to be world-renouncing (See
dharma of world-renouncer) from the viewpoint of Girards theory. The efficacy of sacrificial
mechanisms, as Girard shows, depends on the occlusion of arbitrary exclusion. A specifically
Indian dialetic surrounding the emaciated figure of the world-renouncer with his begging
bowl, his staff and orange dress514 can be interpreted in the light of civilizing mechanism of
reconciliatory victims. Dumont is an expert on the specific dialectic of India around the worldrenunciation and world-renouncer as representative of festive reversal. At the footnote to worldrenunciation as "a social condition in the margins of proper society," he has analyzed the specifi
content of world-renunciation. He has written about "civil death of world-renouncer". Worldrenouncer becomes ancestor that is the object of prvana craddha is. If world-renouncer returns
to social life as householder later again, he and his children, despite fulfillment of the penance,
are treated as untouchables.515
In spite of structural and external similarities between desacralizing and apocalyptic Christ
and sacred Buddhas, the counterpoint between the sacred and desacralizing discourses should
not be neglected.516

2.2. Negativistic Dharma of World-renouncer

Dharma involving the ongoing maintenance of the social and cosmic order is a pivotal
concept around which a Hindus self-understanding revolves. Dharma is the basis of all order,
whether natural, cosmic, social, or moral. By means of ritual (dharmic) actions, Vedic culture
sought to create, reinvigorate, nourish and maintain cosmic order. Dharma as cosmic-ethical and
ritualistic law dominating the world517 can be regarded as social norms and restraints exist for

513

Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights. An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition, 257.
Louis Dumont, Religion/Politics and History in India. Collected Papers in Indian Sociology (Paris/The Hague:
Mouton Publihsers, 1970), 44; Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus: The Caste System and Its Implications (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1980), 273.
514

515

Dumont, Gesellschaft in Indien. Die Soziologie des Kastenwesens, 315, n.18.

Girard, Job: The Victim of His People, 33.
517
V. Glasenapp, Buddhismus und Gottesidee. Die buddhistischen Lehren von den berweltlichen Wesen und
Mchten und ihre religionsgeschichtlichen Parallelen, 58.
516

104

the purpose of suppressing and moderating mimetic rivalry.518Different from the modern society
in which these norms and restraints are being relaxed and mimetic rivalries are very much on
the increase, mechanisms of karma and dharma serves as norms for alleviating mimetic rivalries.
It could - in principle - be a professional dharma for prostitutes, robbers and thieves as well as
for all Brahmins and kings.519.
So there can be a dharma of killing for soldiers and butchers, of stealing for the thieves or
of adultery for prostitutes.520 In the Hindu view man can do good or evil only in the sense that
he is obedient to or violates the dharma of his caste. Mans sin consists only of violations
against caste ritual, for which there are specific penalties in this life or in future reincarnations.
Hindu theory lacks the conception of a radical evil or mans fundamental sinfulness. There is
no 'ethics' per se, but only professionally differentiated dharma.521
There is also a dharma of world-renouncer.522 Dharma of world-renoucer as an exception
consists of ritualistic prohibitions rather than injunctions: A householder that is, a person
belonging to the householders order of life (rama) - is defined by the performance of actions
peculiar to that state, such as procreation and sacrifice. The exception is the world-renouncer,
who is defined by what he has given up rather than by what he does. Technically, his dharma
consists of prohibitions (nivttistra) rather than injunctions. It is the only non-ritual state
recognized within a fundamentally ritual ideology.523 This exceptional singularity of sacred
world-renouncer could be understood in terms of absolutely exceptional surrogate victim. For
Girard, Oedipus as victim is unique. He is guilty of the greatest crimes. Everything about him is
exceptional. Girard has pointed out the baleful singularity of Oedipus and the mythical
image of an absolutely exceptional Oedipus.524
The Dionysian and festive institution of world-renunciation is not defined by its own
dharma, but by the negation of the dharma of life-in-the-world. Its dharma consists in the
denial of the dharma of society. This negative character of world-renunciation is expressed in
the descriptive epithets used with reference to the world- renouncer: anagni (a man without fire),
aniketa (a man without home). Renouncing fire signifies the rejection of the life-in-the-world
in its totality, the denial of the entire value system of worldly society.525 Buddhist negative or
negativistic denial (nothingness, emptiness, desirelessness, egolessness, and so on) should be
viewed in this light of world-renouncers dharma consisting in the denial of the dharma of
518

Ren Girard, Mimesis and Theory: Essays on Literature and Criticism, 1953-2005, ed. Robert Doran (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2008), 257.
519
Weber, Gesammelte Aufstze zur Religionssoziologie II/ Hinduismus und Buddhismus, 142.
520
Axel Michaels, Der Hinduismus. Geschichte und Gegenwart (Mnchen: C. H. Beck, 1998), 32.
521
Weber, Gesammelte Aufstze zur Religionssoziologie II/ Hinduismus und Buddhismus, 143, 178.
522
Patrick Olivelle, The rama System. The History and Hermeneutics of a Religious Institution (New
York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 230.
523
Patrick Olivelle, Sanysa Upaniads. Hindu Scriptures on Asceticism and Renunciation (New York/Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1992), 67.
524
Girard, Oedipus Unbound: Selected Writings on Rivalry and Desire, 59, 61.
525
Olivelle, "A Definition of World Renunciation," 80.

105

worldly society. The negating dharma of world-renoucer is not defined by its own dharma, but
by the negation of the dharma of householder-in-the-world. His exceptional dharma consists in
the denial of the dharma of society. A renouncer should eat food that is begged, indicates that
a world-renouncer should not eat any food that is not begged. The negative and negating state of
world-renunciation is constituted by the abandonment of the life of the man in the world. It is
basically an is not rather than an is. As far as world-renunciation is concerned, none of these
practices are significant in themselves. Their significance lies in the fact that they constitute the
negation of other practices typical of life-in-the-world. What is truly significant is not what a
world- renouncer does, but rather what he implicitly refuses to do by the very fact of doing what
he does. The significance of begging as an act of world-renunciation lies in the fact that it is the
immediate consequence of the rejection of fire, the central element of life-in-the-world. More
directly, it denies the basic function of men in the world earning a livelihood.526
Orthodox thinkers were, according to Olivelle, always ill at ease in dealing with
renunciation, so foreign not only to their way of life but also to their framework of thought.
Nevertheless, Indian society absorbed and integrated many of the values and ideals of the
world-renouncers, who represent the most creative element of the intellectual history of India.
The history of this negation and reassimiliation is, as Olivelle argues, one of the most important
and interesting chapters of the Indian cultural history .527
So Buddhist monks and nuns were only allowed to eat what they had been given. They were
not to provide themselves with food. Even if they chanced upon some food, they were not
allowed to eat it. In this manner they were completely dependent on others, like small
children or hospitalized sick people. Although begging was not a new practice in society at that
time, it was not regarded by all lay people as a respectable way of life. For example, when the
Buddha was begging in the streets of Kapilavatthu, his father expressed disapproval: begging
for alms is bad for the Skyans reputation. Once the Buddha begged at the door of a wealthy
Brahmin called Kas Bhradvja, who was performing a thanksgiving sacrifice for the harvest;
instead of giving him something, the Brahmin flew into a temper: You shaven head ! You
would do better to work rather than beg. Look at me ! I plow and sow; when I have plowed and
sowed, I can eat. If you did the same, you would have something to eat. When the Arahant
Sriputta Thera visited his mother with his pupil, the novice Rhula, the old Brahmin woman
started to wail and berate her son as a garbage-eater. Thus many people were hostile to
begging, notably orthodox Brahmins who thought it degrading.528

526

Ibid., 82.
Ibid., 83.
528
Mohan Wijayaratna, Buddhist Monastic Life according to the Texts of the Theravada Tradition, trans. Steven
Collins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 58-9.
527

106

2.3. Ritual and Civil Death of the World-Renouncer

World-renunciation constitutes the ritual and therefore the civil death of the renouncer.
Two significant legal consequences follow: on the one hand, world-renouncers are unable to
participate in legal transactions, and, on the other, they are released from all contracts previously
entered into. The principle of a renouncers civil death is applied to three important areas:
marriage, partition of property, and debt. Renunciation on the part of the husband, along with
his death and prolonged absence, are the three recognized causes of the dissolution of a
marriage.529
By providing a radicalized interpretative framework, Girardian mimetic hermeneutics of
suspicion on the conception of order based on the hidden mechanisms of the mimetic violence
at the origin of all institutions could shed illuminating light on sacrificial reading of worldrenoucing and life-negating Indian renouncers. In his article Ritual Suicide and the Rite of
Renunciation, Olivelle helps us to further the sacrificial reading of world-renunciation
(Malamoud). Suicide with religious motives has been a common phenomenon in the history of
India down to the present day. It is, however, primarily in the traditions of world-renunciation
that suicide came to be considered a proper way, and in some cases the most excellent way, of
bringing to an end mans earthly sojourn. Among the Jains, the mot excellent way to end ones
life is by starvation (sallekhana). All the founders of the Jain faith are said to have committed
suicide in this fashion.530
We can detect the traces of generative violence hidden behind festive institution of worldrenunciation and its world-renouncer as a representative of the sacred. Girard criticizes that
modern interpreters are usually eager to further minimize, disregard, and efface the last traces of
generative violence.531 We find that a vnaprastha (forest hermit), i.e. a member of the third
stage of life (rama), was permitted to commit suicide when he found himself too feeble to
perform the duties of his state. The method recommended for him is the so-called Great Journey
(mahprasthna). It consists of walking in a northerly or northeasterly direction toward the
Himalayan mountains without eating or drinking until one fell dead. Later legal literature,
however, as well as the special treatises on world-renunciation indicate that suicide was
customary even among orthodox world-renouncers. Three steps are a symbol of this
archetype of religious suicide. Taking a few steps would then be, according to Olivelle, a
symbolic enactment of suicide, the relics of an ancient custom. In fact, suicide among worldrenouncers is presented as the concluding act of the initiatory rite of world-renunciation.
Olivelle has pointed out the connection between suicide and the rite of renunciation. Worldrenoucers may either commit suicide immediately after renouncing or continue to live as world529

Olivelle, The rama System. The History and Hermeneutics of a Religious Institution, 207.
Patrick Olivelle, "Ritual Suicide and the Rite of Renunciation," in Wiener Zeitschrift fur die Knde Sdasiens 22
(1978), 19.
531
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 300.
530

107

renouncers. When suicide is not committed, the world-renouncer takes five or seven symbolic
steps toward the east or the north. He is then requested by his teacher or by some other
respected person to return.532 While world-renunciation results in civil death, a prolonged
absence is probably seen as creating a presumption of death.533
The world-renouncer Buddha conforms to the type of forest renunciation. The yogic
world-renouncer Buddha was indeed a saint of the forest whose earliest disciples were forest
renunciants and who espoused a dharma essentially of forest renunciation. The spiritual
priority of forest renunciation must be noted. 534 If world-renunciation is defined as the
abandonment or the non-performance of rites, then the renunciatory mode of life cannot be the
object of any positive injunction. World-renunciation is the subject of negative injunctions,
namely prohibitions (niedha). World-renouncers, therefore, do not perform rites because they
are forbidden to do so.535 Concerning about the dispassionate who has renounced, there was
"almost exclusively negative catalog" ('he will not stay ... ... do ... eat ... walk').536
The entry in the (world-renouncing) bodhisattva path is marked negatively through the
renunciation of home and family.537 The world-renouncer dies to society he has no longer
a social status, indeed his funeral rites are performed and is reborn into his new status of lone
salvation-seeker, just as the sacrificer had to be reborn through initiation into the sacrificial loka.
Just as, for the duration of the sacrifice, the yajamna was outside the human loka, being
charged with a profound but dangerous cosmic power, and was- as far as his membership of
caste society was concerned in an intermediate stage between life and death, so the
renouncer, being outside caste rules, is an object of awe as holy, but is also impure, so far as
normal social contact is concerned. World-renouncer whose whole life is a sacrifice is
permanently outside society, never returning to the human world from the sacred sphere into
which his renunciation has put him.538

2.4. Negativistic Philosophy of Buddhism

Therefore, the "negativistic philosophy of Buddhism" (negativistische Philosophie des

532

Olivelle, "Ritual Suicide and the Rite of Renunciation," 20-2, 39.

Olivelle, The rama System. The History and Hermeneutics of a Religious Institution, 207.
534
Ray, Buddhist Saints in India. A Study in Buddhist Values & Orientations, 67.
535
Olivelle, Sanysa Upaniads. Hindu Scriptures on Asceticism and Renunciation, 64.
536
Sprockhoff, Sanysa. Quellenstudien zur Askese im Hinduismus. Bd. I: Untersuchungen ber die SanysaUpaniads, 172.
537
Heinrich Dumoulin, Spiritualitt des Buddhismus: Einheit in lebendiger Vielfalt (Mainz: Matthias Grnewald
Verlag, 1995), 186.
538
Collins, Selfless Persons: Imagery and Thought in Theravada Buddhism, 63.
533

108

Buddhismus )539 and "preference of Buddhism for the negation" (Vorliebe des Buddhismus fr
die Negation)540 can be traced back to the social anthropological roots ofnegativistic and worldnegating dharma of world-renouncer. The ascetic intention and function of Buddhist
negating statement541 is observed. "The way of negation" is via negative of negating and
empting world-renouncer. Using the "way of dialectical negation," Ngrjuna as the "father of
negativism" in the Mahyna uses the whole field of his dialectical thinking in order to
"destroy" the ignorance of clinging to the relative as absolute.542
In this sense of negativism, the schools of Mahyna taught that 'everything is empty'
(sarva nyam). They professed a "total negativism" (nyavda).543 The most important
"'philosophical'" Mahynastras are the Prajapramits (the stras of Perfection of Wisdom).
This wisdom exists in the knowledge of the nyavda, the "negativism" (Negativismus) that
declares all things 'empty' and denies both being and nonbeing, and has a "no" to every
question.

544

Considered
545

Prajapramitstras

social

anthropologically,

the

"negativistic"

teaching

of

are to be understood from the viewpoint of the world-renouncing

(dharma) of Bodhisattva. Winternitz has drawn attention to the context of the "bad habit" of
constant repetition and negativism: it is understandable that one can come to the view that "the
world is not real and everything is empty and void, that one could not answer any question other
than "no."546
That renoucers should cease performing ritual acts is, as Olivelle argues, a general
prohibition (utsarga). It is this general prohibition that defines their renunciatory status. The
specific actions performed by some renouncers are the subject of specific injunctions (niyama).
The argument is that the ritual acts that some world-renouncers continue to perform are
exceptions to the general rule. Such an injunction has a positive form but contains a negative
prescription; that is, the injunction is in reality a prohibition. 547 The world-renouncing
negativism and life-negating detachment of Buddhism could be traced back to the dharma of
world-renouncers. Buddha and Buddhas principal successor are depicted as a paradigmatic
forest saint, dwelling in solitude, wandering from place to place, delighting in meditation, and
preaching a dharma of forest renuniciation.548World-renouncer gives nothing, but lives on
alms (bhik na dadyt, living on alms, giving nothing). As a dead man, he cannot give,
539

Winternitz, Geschichte der Indischen Literatur. Band 3, 431.

Dumoulin, Der Erleuchtungsweg des Zen im Buddhismus, 131.
541
M. Eliade, Geschichte der religisen Ideen. Bd. 2: Von Gautama Buddha bis zu den Anfngen des Christentums
( Freiburg: Herder Verlag, 1979), 90.
542
Dumoulin, Der Erleuchtungsweg des Zen im Buddhismus, 131.
543
Winternitz, Geschichte der indischen Literatur, Band 2, 184.
544
Ibid., 247.
545
Winternitz, Geschichte der Indischen Literatur. Band 3, 272.
546
Winternitz, Geschichte der indischen Literatur, Band 2, 248.
547
Olivelle, Sanysa Upaniads: Hindu Scriptures on Asceticism and Renunciation, Translated and with an
Introduction, 66.
548
Ray, Buddhist Saints in India. A Study in Buddhist Values & Orientations, 64.
540

109

but only receive. The regulation that world-renouncer cannot give, but basically is recipient, is
clearly formulated.549
The Mahyna stras take as their central ideal the bodhisattva who is a saint of the
forest. The life of forest renunciation represents the normative Buddhist way of life for
Bodhisattvas. The Mahyna discussion of forest bodhisattvas may be gained by considering
some fragements of Mahyna stras treating forest bodhisattvas, contained in the eleventh,
or Praise of the Forest (arayasavarana), chapter of the iksamuccaya, attributed to the
Buddhist monk ntideva. Life in the forest having dangerous environment where wild beasts
raom is difficult. For example, noisesome beasts may appear, but the bodhisattva should not fear,
remembering that he has already renounced his life. ntidevas extracts show a fairly strict
divisions of labor between forest and village renunciants: the village renunciants are textual
specialists, who know the texts and engage in preaching them, whereas the forest renunciants
primarily meditate. That the renunciant bodhisattva represents the forest type is indicated by the
facts that he is described as living alone in the forest and meditating and that he is nowhere
shown in monastic settings or following the prtimoka or as reflecing moanstic values. The
forest identity of the renunciant bodhisattva is also suggested by the fact that the term yogin is
used interchangeably with bodhisattva in contexts of forest renunciation, meditation, and
realization. According to the ideal of the yogin-bodhisattva who dwells in the forest, this
Buddhist world-renouncer freely he wandered without a home and this is what the yogin
should do. The yogin-bodhisattva is a devoted yogin who observes the ascetic practices
(dhuta). He may live in mountain caves infested with wild animals for many years. Thus yogic
bodhisattva is presented as a forest saint. The bodhisattva generally conforms to the type of
forest saint as described in the Nikya literature.550
Although from the time of the Upaniads much lip service was paid to the ascetic,
conventional Hinduism always maintained a very real hostility toward renunciation. The
aiva ascetic was considered a despiser of Vedic rites and religious institutions, and his mere
existence was a slur upon the conventional society which he rejected. The non-Vedic Vrtya
ascetic was classed with the dregs of society, such as incendiaries, poisoners, pimps, spies,
adulterers, abortionists, atheists, and drunkards. Fringe members of society could find a
comparatively respectable status among the aivas, while iva, the erotic ascetic and Dionysian
world-renouncer par excellence, himself was eventually condemned as the author of their
rites.551 kyamuni Buddha was called muaka, samaaka or vasalaka as terms of contempt
by a brhmaa named Bhradvja. When going for alms from house to house, the Buddha went
to the house of the brhmaa Bhradvja. The brhmaa saw h im coming at a distance and,

549

Sprockhoff, Sanysa. Quellenstudien zur Askese im Hinduismus. Bd. I: Untersuchungen ber die SanysaUpaniads, 65.
550
Ray, Buddhist Saints in India. A Study in Buddhist Values & Orientations, 252-69.
551
Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, Siva: The Erotic Ascetic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 67.

110

seeing him, he told him to come no further by addressing him as muaka, samaaka, and
vasalaka. In the broad sense of the word, muaka means having a shaved head, samaaka
means belonging to a religious mendicant and vasalaka means belonging to an outcaste:
dra. These sorts of religious people were reckoned the same as a kind of outcaste.

552

3. Modern World as Mimetic Crisis

3.1. Mimetic Passions and Sacrificial Reality
For Girard, the biblical revelation of scapegoat mechanism destroyed the archaic forms of
violence reduction and led to the modern world, which can be interpreted as a large mimetic
crisis.553 If the history of modern society is marked by the dissolution of differences, that clearly
has something to do with the sacrificial crisis. Indeed, the phrase modern world seems, for
Girard, almost like a synonym for sacrificial crisis. Girard has noted, however, that the modern
world manages to retain its balance, precarious though it may be; and the methods it employs to
do so, though extreme, are not so extreme as to destroy the fabric of the society. Primitive
societies are unable to withstand such pressures.554
The following is concerned with the mimetic passion of competition in the modern Buddhist
societies in the state of a kind of mimetic crisis.555 Using the mimesis and scapegoat mechnism
theory of Girard as a point of reference, Feddema deals with the cursing services in Sinhala
Buddhism in Sri Lanka which some gods offer to the people. According to him, the cursing
practice in Buiddhist Sri Lanka is to be understood as a kind of religious channel for keeping
physical violence in control. Why is cursing on the increase in the country, and how does
Buddhism, a religion preaching ahimsa(non-violence), cope with the cursing practices ?
Cursing, widely practiced by Buddhists, is part of those Buddhist rituals and beliefs and
therefore can not be dismissed as folk religion. Feddema explains the increase in activities of
cursing in Buddhist societies in light of mimetic theory. In the first decades after gaining
independence in 1948 there was a strong rise in expectations among the people. These high
expectations could not be met. The ensuing frustration caused an increase in jealousy and
scapegoat mechanisms among the people. Not only was the system or the ruling political party
blamed, but also neighbors and minority groups, who seemed to be more fortunate than
552

Shiraishi, Asceticism in Buddhism and Brahmanism : A Comparative Study, 146.

Palaver, Ren Girards mimetische Theorie. Im Kontext kulturtheoretischer und gesellschaftspolitischer Fragen,
313-4.
554
Girard, Violence and the Sacred (New York/London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005), 199.
555
More Mimesis in a Less Hierarchical Society (J. P. Feddema, "The Cursing Practice in Sri-Lanka as a
Religious Channel for Keeping Physical Violence in Control: the Case of Seenigama, in Journal of Asian and
African Studies 32/3-4 (1997), 217-8.
553

111

themselves. The context of what Girard calls mimesis and scapegoat mechanisms is a process of
urbanisation in the demographic and especially in the cultural sense. Cursing then is seen as an
alternative to the modern system of being punished by the police or the state. Using this
rationalization, even good Buddhists participate in the practice of cursing.556
Feddema maintains that cursing is not only to be seen as violence, but also as a religious
channel for violence that helps to keep it in control. Girard sees judicial punishment as
embodying revenge in principle, but as infinitely superior in practice to the extent that it
represents the last word of violence. Sorcery may be a canalization of aggressive impulses of
individuals557, cursing however is, for Feddema, in nature a religious channel for keeping
physical violence in check. If a judicial system is completely lacking, the religious system is
according to Girard essentially functional in preventing the vicious circle of mimetic violence.
Today in Sri Lanka however the judicial system is not lacking. The idea of revenge by taking
the law into ones own hands and even killing adversaries did, however, not disappear from the
minds of the people. The religious system of punishment in the eyes of the people seems often
more effective than the modern judicial one.558
For Girard there is a common denominator that determines the efficacy of all sacrifices and
that becomes increasingly apparent as the institution grows in vigor. This common denominator
is internal violence all the dissensions, mimetic rivalries, jealousies, and quarrels within the
community that the sacrifices are designed to suppress. 559 Businessmen and politicians in
Buddhist Sri lanka are known to visit Sennigama in order to try to eliminate rivals. Competition
sometimes indeed was and is a motive to try to curse a rival. Traditionally fishermen sometimes
cursed other fishermen, because their boat attracted more fish than their own boat.560
Disappearance of the social cohesion of the traditional village, based on hierachical caste
and class distinctions between families banded together through the hierarchy of patron-client
relationships causes, for Feddema, more mimesis. Everybody knew his or her place. That
limited the envy due to mimesis. The paradox therefore is that in an egalitarian society there is a
great increase in mimetic desire and rivalry. Equality is good in itself, because it ends the
injustice of feudal hierarchy, but on the other hand it is also a source of new suffering, because it
leads to a never ending desire for more material things and a rise in competition and rivalry.
This seems, according to Feddema, to be the case in Sri Lanka today. Frustration after the rising
of expectations due to independence, migration (rural urban and rural-rural), urbanization in the
cultural sense, the disappearance of social cohesion of the traditional village based on
556

Ibid., 202-3, 210, 216-7.

G. Obeyesekere, Sorcery, Premeditated Murder, and the Canalization of Aggression in Sri Lanka, Ethnology
14 (1975), 11.
558
Feddema, "The Cursing Practice in Sri-Lanka as a Religious Channel for Keeping Physical Violence in Control:
the Case of Seenigama, 216.
559
Girard, Violence and the Sacred (New York/London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005), 8.
560
Feddema, "The Cursing Practice in Sri-Lanka as a Religious Channel for Keeping Physical Violence in Control:
the Case of Seenigama, 215.
557

112

hierarchical caste, sex and class distinctions, and the increasing gap between poor and rich due
to economical competition, all created a climate, in which mimetic envy, violence and crime
could flourish. Feddema argues that Buddhism did not succeed in preventing or stopping the
disguised violence of cursing through Devol, Getabaru and Suniyam, in the past or at the
present. Hardly anybody foresaw the sudden breakthrough of mimesis and rivalry after the
independence and after the introduction of economic liberalization, nor the violence, jealousy
and scapegoating this provoked.561
Inspired by Girard, Signer has analyzed the destructive power of envy, economy of
witchcraft, sacrifice, violence and victims, and witchcraft, corruption/nepotism in African
society - a view which sees witchcraft as an intersection where all of these phenomena and
processes meet, intersect, which makes witchcraft and sorcery a central and integrating
complex.562 The trans-cultural mimetic theory accounts for the preoccupation of even educated
members of the elite with traditional forms of supernaturalism. Political leaders in Asia and
Africa may resort to sorcery to destroy political opponents or use white magic for more positive
political purposes. In Sri Lanka, according to Gombrich/Obeyesekere,563 practically every
politician left and right propitiates the deity Skanda in order to win an election or ensure
the national electoral success of the party. Prime ministers and cabinet ministers have been
devotees of the cult. Before any general election large motorcades from the political parties visit
Kataragama.

3.2. Mimetic Crisis and Intensification of Amulet cults

In his book, The Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets (Cambridge Studies
in Social Anthropology 49) Tambiah has analyzed the "crisis of legitimacy and the obsession
with amulets."564 The social anthropological re-reading of Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the
Cult of Amulets in the light of Girardian hermeneutic of suspicion for the analysis of the myths
and religious rituals helps us to unveil the sacrificial dimension and root of Buddhist cult of
forest world-renouncers relics and amulets. In Thailand, the collection of amulets becomes a
kind of "art" especially among men, whose prominent position exposes them to greater risks
than women.565
The "obsession with amulets" and lavish merit-making has something to do with the
561

Ibid., 217-20.
Signer, Die konomie der Hexerei oder Warum es in Afrika keine Wolkenkratzer gibt, 12.
563
Gombrich and Gananath Obeyesekere, Buddhism Transformed. Religious Change in Sri Lanka, 185.
564
Tambiah, The Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets, 344.
565
Jane Bunnag, Der Weg der Mnche und der Weg der Welt: Der Buddhismus in Thailand, Laos und
Kambodscha, in Der Buddhismus. Geschichte und Gegenwart, ed. Heinz Bechert und Richard Gombrich (Mnchen:
C.H. Beck, 1984), 207.
562

113

mimetic rivalry: In a sense, the Thai craze for and insatiable collection of protective amulets
and other fetisches should be viewed, for Tambiah, in relation to their propensities and
preoccupations with the exercise of power, in which violence shows its dark face. That it is men
rather than women who obsessively collect amulets is in accord with the fact that it is they
who predominantly participate in violent competition for coercive power. Their obsession with
amulets, its lavish merit-making, and its insatiable consultation of astrologers and diviners
566

could be well explained from the viewpoint of mimetic crisis that becomes unavoidable

particularly when, chiefly as a result of a breakdown of social barriers, distinctions, and

differences between people are blurred or obliterated. Whereas traditional societies had
institutions that maintained social differences and so averted or canalized the outbreak of
mimetic crisis, modern societies including Buddhist modern societies are characterized by the
pursuit of equality with the result that the mimetic crisis is constantly lying in wait. Religion
itself, in Girards view, is rooted in the violent resolution of the mimetic crisis, being the source
of all taboos, rites and myths. While taboos serve to prevent the outbreak of a mimetic crisis, the
purpose and function of rites, including Buddhist (tantric or Dionysian) rituals is to simulate and
reproduce this sacrificial crisis with the purpose of canalizing the pent-up aggression into safe
channels (See world-renunciation and its representative of the violent sacred as safety valve for
world order).
The cult of amulets is, in Tambiahs view, no mere superstition or idolatry of the poor or
unlettered. Businessmen, military men, ordinary folk, the man or woman on the street all
openly talk of their interest in these amulets and readily show them to you, explicating their
virtues and history. Even most liberal or progressive of them, espousing modern science
and holding against superstitions, and even proclaiming left-wing or at least antimilitary
sentiments, wear them or keep them at home.567
The most ardent pursuers and collectors of amulets sanctified by the Buddhist meditation
masters and forest arahants (radical forest world-renouncer) are the urban ruling elements, the
intelligentia, and the wielders of force, the military. Thus a sociological answer, for Tambiah,
must be given as to why the propensity to seek contact with sacred powers possessed by the
world-renouncers, and to resort to the fetishism of amulets, has shown greater force and
conspicuousness in recent years. The answer to the intensification may lie in the internal and
external political circumstances confronting Thailand today,568 which could be explained in
terms of mimetic crisis. .The amulets that are sacralized by meditating radical world-renouncer
are desired especially by middle and upper classes. Here charisma is condensed into objects,
which by being blessed by the sacred world-renouncer and by reflecting in their symbolism the
Buddha, have acquired meritorious power coveted especially today by the Thai middle and
566

Tambiah, The Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets, 229.
Ibid., 197.
568
Ibid., 344-5; J. L. Taylor, Forest Monks and the Nation-State: An Anthropological and Historical Study in
Northeastern Thailand (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1993), 184.
567

114

upper classes, partly reflecting unease at the legitimacy of the present political order.569
The hidden dimension of the Thai ideology of amulets consists, Tambiah insists, in the
differential power distribution and social control vested in its lay social hierarchy of kings,
generals and bureaucrats, urban workers and rural farmers. The more historic, more famous,
more potent amulets are in the hands of the rulers and the wealthy, for they are the sponsors of
the ascetic saint as an amulet maker. These sacralized amulets by radical world-renouncer
confirm them in their powers and act as sureties of wealth. They reflect and legitimate, to put in
a Thai idiom, the hierarchy of merit. 570 The role of modern Thai saints, forest monks, and
meditation masters lies in, according to Tambiah, in the sacralization of amulets and the lay
sponsors and possessors of these amulets use the sacralized amulets for the life-affirming
activities of this world in the manipulation of politics, commerce, and love.571
Tambiah has dealt with the rituals of sacralization of amulets and the process by which
potency and efficacy are transferred by the Buddhist (forest) monks to the amulets.
Underlying mechanisms of this sacralization could be understood in the light of surrogate
victim mechanism. The most famous sacralizers of amulets, according to Tambiah, are some
of the forest monks, the meditation masters and saints (arahants). We have mentioned before
that traditionally in the Southeast Asian Buddhist societies there has been a bifurcation of the
sagha into the village-and-town-dwelling(gmavs) and the forest-dwelling (raavs)
monks.The forest-monks sacralization of amulets and his transfer of power (saksit) to them
mainly consists of two components: the chanting of sacred words(sk khth), which include
the standard paritta chants for conferring protection and prosperity; and the sitting in meditation,
in particular employing the techniques of concentration(nang prok) and of transferring psychic
energy. The sacralization of amulets is essentially similar to the chanting and transference
procedures by which Buddha statues are ceremonially installed and animated by the opening
of the eyes (bk phra nt).572
The charismatic north-eastern forest monks were obvious targets in the objectification of
ritual merit-making.573 The most elementary sacralization ritual, called pluk sek, can be
observed, when a monk gives a small Buddha image to a layman. Taking the image in both
hands, the monks bring it close to his mouth and murmur a short Pali formula. The elaborate
ceremony primarily designed to sacralize amulets is called phutthaphisek. This ritual should
be held on a day when the spirits are strong.574 Buddhist world-renouncing monks who chant
569

Ninian Smart, On the Veneration of Forest Monks in Thai Buddhism, (book reviews), in History of Religions
25/3 (1986), 280-1.
570
Tambiah, The Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets, 342.
571
Ibid., 6.
572
Ibid., 258-60.
573
Taylor, Forest Monks and the Nation-State: An Anthropological and Historical Study in Northeastern Thailand,
209.
574
B. J. Terwiel, Monks and Magic: An Analysis of Religious Ceremonies in Central Thailand (Bangkok: White
Lotus, 1994), 65.

115

Pali texts, who meditate, or who preach are believed to emanate a protective power, and that
objects and persons in the proximity can become charged with this beneficial power.575
Indeed, every sacralized amulet manifests radiating energy (techo) which the Buddha himself
possessed in immense measure.576
Buddhist sacralization of radical world-renouncers relics and amulets could be explained by
Girards insigts into the sacralizing invisible mechanisms of reconcilatory victims. The
"obsession with amulets" in modern Thai Buddhist society was understood aginst the
background of Buddhist modern society in a state of mimetic crisis. In spite of apocalyptic view
on modernity, Girard acknowledges the achievement of the modern and western world and its
growing ability to decipher phenomena of collective violence and then to produce texts of
persecution rather than myths. The discovery of the founding mechanism as a mechanism not
only of religion but of culture itself is a decisive step. A society that replaces myth by an
awareness of persecution is a society in the process of desacralization. Girard says that outside
modern and western society the mechanism is invisible because it is constantly in retreat. In
Judaeo-Western society, on the other hand, it has gradually come forward again and is more and
more visible. This growing visibility has innumerable consequences. In so far as light is shed
on the victimage mechanism, concepts like violence and unjust persecution become thinkable
and began to paly a larger role in cultural institutions.577

4. Violence and Reciprocity

4.1. Violence and Reciprocity in Girards Theory
Girard stressed the connection between violence and reciprocity. In his views, a permanent
double imitation exists in human relations. Girard has paid attention to the relationship between
gift and poison. In several languages the word, the gift has also the meaning of poison. As
Mauss writes, the word gift in Germanic languages can mean both a gift and a poison. In receiving
a gift all kinds of obligations are required. In an archaic world, all gifts are poisoned, their
original owners give only things that are poisoning their own existence and thus get rid of them.
It is easier to live with the wives of others as their own. Herein is given, says Girard, the source
of the exchange. Mauss, and many others wonder constantly, without finding an answer as to
why the peaceful exchange relations aspects contains violent, sometimes extremely "realistic
pretensions of acute conflict." The strength of Mauss research lies in the way he sees the
rivalistic tendency in all kinds of exchange, and therefore regards rivalry as something inevitable.
575

Ibid., 115.
Taylor, Forest Monks and the Nation-State: An Anthropological and Historical Study in Northeastern Thailand,
188.
577
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 126-7,
576

116

Because of the extraordinary conservatism of the rites, Girard says, "traces of violence in the
exchange relations" have survived to our time. According to Girard, the artificial differences or
differences in the archaic communities protected them from 'bad reciprocity." The gift may be
dangerous. It may be a so huge gift (as in potlach) that it humiliates the other: you may want,
firstly, to display your prestige, to present yourself as better, richer, or stronger.

4.2. Gift and Sacrificial Gift in Gastropolitics and -semantics

The social anthropological issue of the "poisoned gift" and violent aspects of the exchangerelationship between world-renouncer and man-in-the-world in the Buddhist ritual giving will
be analyzed in the light of Girard's analysis of violence and reciprocity. After a long absence,
gift-giving in India has recently made an appearance in the anthropology of exchange.578 The
Poison in the Gift, by G. G. Raheja, has been of decisive importance. Dan (ritual gifts) is always
believed by both donors and recipients to involve a transfer of inauspiciousness.579 The
world-renouncers alms-round is enmeshed in the game of gastro-politics. The way the two
sides behave seems quite fiercely competitive, and the idiom of coercive hospitality again
suggests the gastro-politics of competitive giving, in which accepting food creates status
inferiority. 580 To sacred world-renouncers more than householders, foods constitute a
comprehensive yet delicate and subtle language, marked with a wide array of cosmic, social,
emotional, karmic, and spiritual messages. Foods, always imprinted by the transactors guaclusters, produce indirect (as in meditation or dreams) as well as direct (as by health or sickness)
consequences for the yogi.581
As Luithle582 notes, the recipient of a ritual gift (dn) "digested" the "sin" (pp), the related
impurity and inauspiciousness (aubh / kuubh / naubh) of the donor. In the Brahmanic legal
theory of the gift (dna-dharma), which Marcel Mauss employs in his Essai sur le don, the
recipients of the gifts fall into a lower position than the donor. World-renouncer as recipient of
ritual gifts accepts to a certain degree of impurity. The gift is a kind of sacrifice: "The gift is a kind
of sacrifice, in which the gift or impurity is destroyed. " Part of this Brahmanical notions of the
"impurity in the gift" is explained by people's religious beliefs. The specialist of the sacred is able

578

See Gloria Goodwin Raheja, The Poison in the Gift. Ritual Prestation, and the Dominant Caste in a North Indian
Village (Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press, 1988); Jonathan Parry, The Gift, Die Indian Gift und the
Indian Gift, in Man: The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21/3 (1986), 453-473.
579
Laidlaw, Riches and Renunciation: Religion, Economy, and Society among the Jains, 294.
580
Ibid., 305, 318.
581
R.S. Khare (ed), The Eternal Food: Gastronomic Ideas and Experiences of Hindus and Buddhists (New York:
State University of New York Press, 1992), 41.
582
Luithle, Von Asketen und Kaufleuten. Reinheit, Reichtum und soziale Organisation bei den vetmbara-Jaina im
westlichen Indien, 326-7.

117

to "absorb this impurity."583 The gift is perceived as a sacrifice to a worthy monk. Gifts to
Brahmins have been the focus of scholarly work on Indian religion, especially in anthropology.
The most puzzling character of the gift in an Indian setting is its ambiguity. Several writers have
pointed out that the Brahmins is reluctant to receive gifts. From the recipients point of view, the
gift is potentially poisonous. The gift contains impurity.584 Heesterman argued that the Brahmin
officiant in Vedic times took over the death-impurity of the patron by accepting gifts, but that
this role was fundamentally changed through the individualization of the ritual.585 J. Parry
argues that the Brahmins of Benares become living sewers as they receive the death-impurity
of mourners conveyed in the gift.586 The poison in the gift is really inauspiciousness (nubh).
The gift is seen as a sacrifice and the world-renouncer has taken the place of the gods on
earth.587 The world-renouncers, where Hindu, Buddhist or Jain, often seem to be under some
sort of obligation to accept the gifts presented to them. But in spite of the obligation to receive
gifts, a recurring theme in the behavior and the ideology of the recipient is an initial
unwillingness to accept. Here we touch on the fundamental ambiguity of the institutionalized
giving. For the Brahmins the gift is dangerous to accept, Mauss says, because of the bonds that
are established in the gift. The same danger is found in Buddhism and Jainism.588 The Brahman
priest is presented as a kind of sacrificial vessel (ptra) in which gifts and food are put in order
to get rid of evil (dosh) and sin (pp).589 Indeed, the panda is the specialist in accepting dan on
behalf of the ancestors and on behalf of the tirtha as a sacred field (kshetra)Besides being
equated with the sacrificial fire, the Brahman is seen as a sacrificial vessel (ptra). Gift-giving
is part of a set of ritual actions to ward off inauspiciousness (amangal), and to get rid of sin
(pp) and illness (rog). The effects of ominous conjunctions can be warded off by gifts. A
person can get rid of illness and sin by gift-giving. Crucial in these rituals aimed at warding off
inauspiciousness and getting rid of sin and illness is the idea that these substances are given
away with the gift. One transfers not only the gift, but also karma in the form of sin and
illness.590
Whatever a world-renouncer eats, becomes a sacrifice offered in the internal fires. His
eating becomes a sacrificial offering. His body and bodily functions are transformed into a long
sacrificial session. The world-renouncers body thus becomes a sacred object. It is equal to the

583

Michaels, Der Hinduismus. Geschichte und Gegenwart, 218-20.

Torkel Brekke, Contradiction and the Merit of Giving in Indian Religions, in Numen: International Review for
the History of Religions. 45/ 3 (1998), 287.
585
J. C. Heesterman, Brahmin, Ritual and Renouncer, in Wiener Zeitschrift fr die Kunde Sd- und Ostasiens 8
(1964), 3, 14-16.
586
Jonathan P. Parry, Death in Banaras (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 123. See also Parry, The
Gift, the Indian Gift and the Indian Gift.
587
Brekke, Contradiction and the Merit of Giving in Indian Religions, 291.
588
Ibid., 298-99.
589
Van der Veer, Gods on Earth: Religious Experience and Identity in Ayodhya, 194.
590
Ibid., 200-4.
584

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fire altar where the Vedic rites are performed.591 The fire of the Vedic sacrifices burns inside the
world-renouncer and it is there that the real sacrifices are performed. The world-renouncer,
sanysin, is one who takes the sacred fire from the hearth and places it within himself. With
the rise of Buddhism and Jainism the real sacrifice came to be the gifts to the order of monks
instead of the traditional Brahminical rituals.592
The world-renouncer does not abandon his fires, he rather makes them rise up within
himself. Moreover, he heats himself at the three sacrificial fires. World-renouncer has
absorbed sacrificial fires in his body. There were world-renouncers three alternatives to end
his days: 1. entering the fire, the road of the hero; 2. non-eating; 3. the rama of the aged.
Entering the fire is the preferred, but also most difficult method of killing oneself, and is
thereofre called road of the hero.593 World-renouncer should consume the sacrificial fire.
This is performed symbolically by inhaling the smoke and warmth of the sacrificial fires. By
this rite the world-renouncer mystically internalizes the fires, homologizing them with his
breath. He thus abandons the external fires. This process is called technically agnisamropa (the
depositing of the fire in the self.

594

Dna (ritual giving and ritual feeding of the world-renouncer) is held by the normative
dharma texts to have replaced yaja, sacrifice.595 The sacrifice, especially in the Buddhist and
Jain ideologies, became the ritual giving to the order of monks or nuns.596 The gift is a sacrifice
and the giver has an obligation to perform it. If the monks or the world-renouncing ascetics,
who have taken the place of the gods on earth, refuse to accept the gift, it has negative
consequences for the donor. World-renouncer is a poor beggar who is completely dependent
on the ritual giving and feeding of householders.597
In scenario of the rddha transaction, the fashioning of pias (rice balls) plays a key role:
they are a symbol of the newly created body for the deceased and also constitute food offerings
to the dead in order to allay hunger and thirst. The practice of giving alms in the Buddhist
context is known within Buddhist circles as piapta (the casting of pinda). Thus, pias are
the alms which literally provide sustenance for the Buddhist world-renouncer, bhikkhus. Like
the libations of the ancient ritual sacrifice that sustained pitaras, and like the pias of rddha,
this giving of alms represents one side of an important reciprocal relationship.598 Throughout
the Petavatthu and other early Buddhist literature, the Buddha and his followers (the
591

Olivelle, Sanysa Upani ads. Hindu Scriptures on Asceticism and Renunciation, 68-9.
Brekke, Contradiction and the Merit of Giving in Indian Religions, 304.
593
Bronkhorst, The Two Sources of Indian Asceticism, 23-4.
594
Olivelle, Ritual Suicide and the Rite of Renunciation,. 25.
595
Heesterman, The Broken World of Sacrifice: An Essay in Ancient Indian Ritual, 141.
596
Brekke, Contradiction and the Merit of Giving in Indian Religions, 308; Ruppert, Jewel in the Asches. Buddha
Relics and Power in Early Medieval Japan, 37.
597
Brekke, Contradiction and the Merit of Giving in Indian Religions, 303.
598
John C. Holt, ''Assisting the Dead by Venerating the Living: Merit Transfer in the Early Buddhist Tradition,''
Numen 28/1 (1981), 19.
592

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bhikkhusagha) are consistently identified as the most auspicious fields for the making of merit.
Whenever actions are performed which take either Buddha or Sagha as their object, powerful
karmic consequences, such as the transfiguration of petas, result. Thus, in return for piapta,
bhikkhus become a source of transformative spiritual power for the laity. Within the practice of
piapta, those sacrificial offerings formerly given to ancestors through Brhma
ical priests
are now given to the bhikkhusagha.599
One of the distinctive feature of a renouncers life is mendicancy, from which is derived a
common Sanskrit name for a world-renouncer, bhiku (beggar). Begging becomes a daily
exercise. A world-renouncers day appears to revolve around his begging round. Food and the
methods of obtaining food are so central to a world-renouncers life that they form the basis of
most classifications of world-renouncers.600 The world-renouncer has gone beyond the vedic
injunctions of maintaining his sacred fires; living entirely by begging he does not cook his own
food. If fire and cooked food are symbols of culture and raw food of nature, as Lvi-Strauss has
suggested, then the world-renouncer in relinquishing fire has, in a sense, relinquished culture.601
The rule on begging excludes all methods of obtaining food except begging. If a worldrenouncer wants to eat, this rule forces him to obtain his food only by begging.602
Buddhist text, for example Dhammapadahakath, tells the time that Buddha and the
monks were forced to eat inferior food in Veraja, explaining this to have been the result of
bad karma which the monks accumulated during one of the Buddhas previous lives (when, as
five hundred horses, they served inferior food to other horses).603Begging for food must be done
by wandering unconcerned from house to house without paying any attention to whatever is
received. During begging, one should not exchange words with ones donors in order to avoid
any communication with other people.604 Wandering about with his alms-bowl in his hand, [he
should be] regarded as a dumb person though not dumb.605 World-renouncer is simultaneously
required to eat his food in a manner different from the householder for he is not to make it into a
ball and, unlike the householder, he is not required to refrain from touching his lips with his
hands. He is also enjoined not to smack his lips in appreciation in short, his way of eating is to
indicate that food is accepted but not enjoyed.606
In a way, a gift, according to Girard, is always an object that we try to dispose of by
exchanging it for something that our neighbor also wants to get rid of. Here we are touching on
599

Holt, ''Assisting the Dead by Venerating the Living: Merit Transfer in the Early Buddhist Tradition,'' 19-20.
Olivelle, Sanysa Upani ads. Hindu Scriptures on Asceticism and Renunciation, 103.
601
Gavin Flood, An Introduction to Hinduism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 63.
602
Olivelle, Sanysa Upani ads. Hindu Scriptures on Asceticism and Renunciation, 66.
603
Jonathan S. Walters, The Buddha's Bad Karma: A Problem in the History of Theravada Buddhism, in Numen:
International Review for the History of Religions 37/1 (1990), 83.
604
Shiraishi, Asceticism in Buddhism and Brahmanism : A Comparative Study, 193.
605
Ibid., 161.
606
Veena Das, Paradigms of Body Symbolism: an Analysis of Selected Themes in Hindu Culture, in R. Burghart
and A. Cantlie (eds), Indian Religion 7 (1985), 194.
600

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the ambivalence of the sacred. We get rid of what poisons us like a hot potato that is tossed
from hand to hand. This is the primitive law of exchange, and it is highly regulated. It is easier
to live with the wives of others than with ones own. Life is livable only if reciprocity does not
appear. Many anthropologists, Giard asserts, have trouble seeing this, in particular, Lvi-Strauss.
They compete with one another to describe the complexity of the differences and social rules,
without seeing that the rules are only there to prevent the return of reciprocity.607
In Jainism, mendicancy is perceived as heroic. Mendicancy is part of the broader asceticism
of Jain monks an asceticism also understood as heroic for similar reasons in related religious
cultures, such as that of the Buddhist forest monks of Sri Lanka.608 Mendicancy and associated
renunciations are thus liminal phenomena. Even the Christian mendicant orders in the middle
ages used begging mainly out of occasional necessity while traveling and in punctuation of a
larger life of work, teaching, preaching, and prayer. Begging was not an end in itself; for the
Dominicans it was connected with preaching on circuit, and for some Franciscans with the
practice of abolute poverty. Historically, nudity played virtually no role in Christian begging.
Therefore, the economic, social, cultural, philosophical, and theological differences between
Jainism and Christianity, as Munzer puts it, are so large that it might seem scarcely imaginable
that either tradition of religious mendicancy and almsgiving could shed any light on the other.
Though gift practices are important in all societies,
610

system of dna (giving, or charity)

609

economically and socially the Indian

is more enveloping and persistent than anything seen

outside all but a few other societies. Extremely detailed rules govern begging by Jain worldrenouncers. Even a concise summary of these rules runs to some pages. Begging is part of a
religious journey that prepare a monk or nun for a holy death above all a death while in
meditation after prolonged fasting. Begging monks and nuns are fulfilling important religious
and social roles by enabling laypeople to gain religious merit through giving. The Digambar
practice of giving and receiving (hradna) is, even in the present day, formal and
ritualized.611

4.3. Cross and Begging Bowl Similarities and Differences

607

Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoit Chantre, 60-1.

Michael Carrithers, The Forest Monks of Sri Lanka: An Anthropological and Historical Study (Delhi: Oxford
University Press, 1983), 69-136, esp. 102.
609
Marcel Mauss, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies [1950], translated by W. D.
Halls (London: Routledge, 1990).
610
John E. Cort, The Gift of Food to a Wandering Cow: Lay-Mendicant Interaction among the Jains, in K.
Ishwaran, ed., Ascetic Culture: Renunciation and Worldly Engagement (Leiden/Boston/Kln: Brill, 1999), 89, 110;
Vijay Nath, Dna: Gift System in Ancient India (c. 600 B.C- c. A.D. 300) A Socio-Economic Perspective (New
Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers, 1987); Parry, The Gift, The Indian Gift and the Indian Gift.
611
Stephen R. Munzer, Heroism, Spiritual Development, and Triadic Bonds in Jain and Christian Mendicancy and
Almsgiving, in Numen 48 (2001), 50-64.
608

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In his article The Cross and the Begging Bowl: Deconstructing of the Cosmology of
Violence, Fredericks has paid attention to the similarities and differences between Christian
Cross and Buddhist begging bowl from a Girardian viewpoint. Both Jesus and Gautama eschew
violence, but, according to Fredericks, take different paths toward doing so. He argues that the
Buddhist tradition, like the Christian, holds within itself the power to deconstruct the
cosmology of violence and to expose the illegitimacy of sacrificial cults. In spite of these
similarities, there are also essential differences between them. In comparing the historical
Buddha with Jesus of Nazareth as social critics, there is, as Fredericks has rightly pointed out, a
tendency to place heavy emphasis on the real similarities that obtain between these two
religious teachers at the expense of a full appreciation of the differences that distinguish them.
Such a procedure can run the risk of interpreting both Jesus and the historical Buddha with
categories taken from the tradition of the Hebrew prophets.612
Girards mimetic hermeneutics help us to deconstruct the mystified cosmology of violence
and the sacred around the Buddhist world-renouncers begging bowl. The begging bowl of
world-renouncer has taken the place of the sacrificial fire. For Christians, the cross means that
the altar of sacrifice has become a banquet table. In Buddhist tradition, the world-renouncing
monk who enters a village and holds out the begging bowl, ready to receive food from the hands
of all, exposes, for Fredericks, the reality of violence on which the social hierarchies of caste
distinctions are founded.613 The question that occupies Buddhist thought does not appear to
concern the affirmation or rejection of sacrifice, but rather what is the true sacrifice, the latter
being, the interiorized sacrifice. The interesting point is that the monk does not condemn the
institution of sacrifice as such. On the contrary, he exhorts the brahmins to perform the true
sacrifice that is, the renunciatory way of life of the monk and he declares that the true
brahmin is the monk. In the same way the Buddhist Kadanta Sutta (Dgha Nikya 5) gives a
hierarchy of sacrifices, the hightest sacrifices being the way of life of the monk.614
Girard believes that there is noting in Buddhism equivalent to the cross in its power to
deconstruct the cosmology of violence. 615 Critics of this Girardian interpretation of the
Kuttadanta Sutta presented by Fredericks have argued that the final scene of the Sutta, in which
the Ksatriya dines with the Brahman, is not about the deconstruction of the social hierarchy.
Rather the final scene mirrors the establishment of a new kind of hierarchy. The monk, taking
the part of the superior, is honored by the patron, taking the part of his inferior. While the
begging bowl is a symbol of world-renunciation, it is also about patronage and the hierarchy
612

James L. Fredericks, The Cross and the Begging Bowl: Deconstructing the Cosmology of Violence, in
Buddhist-Christian Studies 18 (1998), 165, 155, 160.
613
Ibid., 164.
614
Jan C. Heesterman, The Inner Conflict of Tradition. Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society (Chicago/
London: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), 42.
. 1985.
615
Fredericks, The Cross and the Begging Bowl: Deconstructing the Cosmology of Violence, 164-5.

122

implicit in patronage. The Sutta may be about the renunciation of violence, but is also about the
reestablishment of social hierarchy.616 This paradoxical reestablishment of social hierarchy
established by world-renouncer with his begging bowl could be elucidated from the viewpoint
of Girards theory on differentiating mechanism of reconciliatory victims.
While a laymans palate and culinary art consist in distinguishing dishes and elaborating
recipes, an world-renouncing ascetic erases these distinctions between dishes and assaults his
sense of taste by mixing different kinds of food in the same bowl and eating all at once. The
rules that the ascetic observe no social distinctions between houses as the gapless wanderer,
that he live without a roof. World-renouncer erases the laymens cognitive and affective maps
by crossing the latters boundaries of social and physical spaces, culinary distinctions, and pureimpure categorizations. The ascetics who close his sense doors while the laymans are open is
also a breaker of conventions, a dissolver of man-made cultural categories.

617

A world-renouncer eats food begged from all castes, thus violating the laws of purity.
Without the saving knowledge, such impurity causes the rebirth in unpleasant worlds.618 We
will interpret this world-renouncers erasing, mixing and crossing of social differences and
distinctions in terms of the indifferentiating crimes of reconciliatory victims in Girards theory.
The practice of begging for food eradicates both the social origin and the uniqueness of food
items and flavors and thereby expresses indifference to those qualities such as texture and
flavor which are so important in the food ingestion of the laity. The inevitable mixing of food
which takes place in this method of food gathering, considered to lower flavor, is repeated in the
monks conscious act of mixing immediately before ingestion.619
Vow of Buddhist world-renouncer is to gather and eat the lumps (pia) of alms food
offered by others. World-renouncer receives and eats the alms mixed together in one bowl,
and he refuses other vessels. The world-renouncer mixes foods, fusing all tastes, wears
discarded clothes, and wanders into the forest.

620

Indifferentiation of cultural differences

represented by crossing and wandering world-renouncer could be understood in the light of

symbolism of a dangerous mixing of categories.621 This corresponds to Mary Douglass
theory of pollution622 in which classes are kept separate and bounded. In such a system
616

Ibid.
Tambiah, The Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets, 35-7.
618
Olivelle, Sanysa Upani ads. Hindu Scriptures on Asceticism and Renunciation, 139, n. 6.
619
H. L. Seneviratne, Food Essence and the Essence of Experience, in R.S. Khare (ed), The Eternal Food:
Gastronomic Ideas and Experiences of Hindus and Buddhists (New York: State University of New York Press, 1992),
188-9.
620
Stanley J . Tambiah, Purity and Auspiciousness at the Edge of the Hindu Context in Theravda Buddhist
Societies, in J. B. Carman, and F. A. Margolin, eds., Purity and Auspiciousness in Indian Society (Leiden: E. J. Brill,
1985), 98-9.
621
David Gordon White, You Are What You Eat: The Anomalous Status of Dog-Cookers in Hindu Mythology, in
R.S. Khare (ed), The Eternal Food: Gastronomic Ideas and Experiences of Hindus and Buddhists (New York: State
University of New York Press, 1992), 62.
622
Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (New York: Praeger, 1966).
617

123

pollution is whatever threatens the boundaries which keep classes separate, either by crossing
them or by being anomalous and thus threatening the classificatory system. The products of
such unions are outcastes. The products of the mixing of categories are abhorred.623

4.4. Buddhas Violent Death and Founding Murder

World-renouncing representative of festive and Dionysian sacred eats from the bowl only,
not using side dishes and thus all food offered had to be consumed mixed together in the one
receptacle.624 It is food which is fit only for those spiritual seekers who have renounced the
world, and unfit for worldly beings. Hence the belief that consumption of such food is not
meritorious and will cause rebirth as crows and dogs the visible consumers of discarded food
offerings.625 World-renouncer Buddha has ability to digest such a powerfully charged food that
is appropriate for god (kraftgeladene, nur fr einen Gott bestimmte Speise).626
It has been reported that Buddha ate the flesh of a pig (Skara maddava) at a last meal given
to him by Cunda, a blacksmith. The followers of Buddha should not eat flesh. In the
Lankavatara-Sutra there is explicit prohibition from eating flesh. Whether or not the Buddha
died of a meal of pork has been a big problem among Buddhists and has led to much logical
chopping even among serious scholars. Exegetical works support the interpretation of the
skaramaddava as pork. Budda died because of eating pork. Several vegetarian interpretation of
the term skaramaddava are available in later Buddhist texts as well as in modern writings. But
a recent effort to interpret as a kind of mushroom, does not carry conviction.627
In the passage from the Jivaka Sutta, the Buddha described in the most emphatic terms the
negative karma that someone would incur who invited him or one of his disciples to dinner
and served them meat. The Buddha had forbidden his monks to eat the lethal dish and telling
Cunda to bury the rest of it so that not even animals would eat it. Buddha spoke to Cunda,
saying: Whatever, Cunda, is left over of the sukara-maddava, bury that in a pit. For I do not see
in all this world, with its gods, Maras, and Brahmas, among the host of ascetics and Brahmins,
gods and men, anyone who could eat it and entirely digest it except the Tathagata alone. Budha
realized that the sukaramaddava had been poisoned. Buddha died a violent death.628
The Buddha recognized this food as dangerous. But he ate it, because world-renouncing
623

Frdrique Apffel Marglin, Types of Oppositions in Hindu Culture, in J. B. Carman, and F. A. Margolin, eds.,
Purity and Auspiciousness in Indian Society (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1985), 66.
624
Taylor, Forest Monks and the Nation-State: An Anthropological and Historical Study in Northeastern Thailand,
327.
625
Seneviratne, Food Essence and the Essence of Experience, 189.
626
Schneider, Einfhrung in den Buddhismus, 40.
627
See R. Gordon Wasson, The Last Meal of the Buddha with Memorandum by Walpola Rahula of the Early
Sources for the Meaning of Skaramaddava, JAOS 102.4 (1982), 591-603.
628
Norm Phelps, The Great Compassion: Buddhism and Animal Rights ( New York: Lantern Press, 2004), 83.

124

Buddhist monks should eat any provided food without preference and aversion.629 This alms
food was perceived as "only appropriate to a god, because this food is powerfully charged
(and therefore dangerous for mere mortals) sacrificial food" (die nur einem Gott zukommende,
weil kraftgeladene und daher fr den gewhnlichen Sterblichen gefhrliche Opferspeise).
Flesh-offering that was perceived as shocking" was considered as a "power-charged godly
food (kraftgeladene Gtterspeise).630

It is nothing short of a scandal that such a pre-

eminent figure should have spent his last moments crippled by terrible diarrhea as a result of
eating meat. Buddhists, now proud of their vegeterianism, have susequently been keen to
reinterpret this tale by swapping the pork for a vegetarian dish.631
Here we can see founding mechanism of reconciliatory victims around the Buddhas violent
death through the dangerous and poisonous gift. Girard argues that mankind relies upon a
misunderstanding of the text that explicitly reveals the founding mechanism. 632 In the
founding events of human culture, the violence is hidden, mythologized and the reconciliatory
victim deified. Sacrificial reading of the Buddhas last meal reveals this founding murder and
founding mechanism of Buddhist culture. In Greek tragedy, the scapegoat mechanism is,
according to Girard, always at the end of the play and is never represented on the stage, and that
is part of the difference between tragedy and sacrifice. In Julius Caesar, the collective murder
of Caesar is treated as the foundational event of the Roman Empire, and it occurs on the stage at
the center of the play. This idea reveals Shakespeare's awareness that all great historical forms
are rooted in a founding violence. Culture emerges from the reconciliatory victim through a
series of misinterpretations, which have to be decoded.
The production of the sacred is necessarily and inversely proportional to the understanding
of the mechanisms that produce it. Mechanism of reconciliatory victims can be found not only
in the life of world-renouncing Buddhas last meal, but also in the stories of ritual feeding of
Buddhist monks. The strange discrepancy between canonical image of Piola as a
disciplined enlightened monk and the generally gluttonous image of him presented in the Pli
commentaries has been noted by a number of scholars.633
Piola, an ideal representative of the average bhiku.

takes on the role of a

scapegoat. His legend thus speaks for every world-renouncing monk. The first part of his name
clearly consists of the word pia meaning lump (of food) and, in the Buddhist context,
referring specifically to alms food such as that which is offered to a monk. Buddhaghosa offers
a folk etymology for the name as a whole, deriving it from pia+ ulati (to go), thus giving
the image of a man who goes for alms. This, of course, would be a characteristic of all Buddhist
629

Walter Karwath, Buddhismus fr das Abendland. Freiheit durch Erkenntnis (Wien: Octopus-Verlag, 1983), 319.
Schneider, Einfhrung in den Buddhismus, 36-7.
631
Bernard Faure, Unmasking Buddhism (John Wiley & Sons, 2011), 12.
632
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 181.
633
John S. Strong, The Legend of the Lion-roarer: A Study of the Buddhist Arhat Piola Bhradvja, in Numen
26 (1979), 64.
630

125

world-renouncing monks, but the implication here is that Piola goes for alms with a particular
persistence and zest: Desiring alms (pia) he goes (ulati). The English translation alms gogetter, would perhaps best describe this understanding of his name. Piola would be called a
storehouse of food precisely because eating was his overriding concern. It is not just food
that Piola stores, but food-offerings. He is, so to speak, greedy for the acts of merit of the
laity. In this sense, Piola can be conceived of as a personification of the Buddhist monks
begging bowl. World-renouncer Piola is eminently qualified to receive food offerings but
does not enjoy them.634 The begging bowl represents indeed the very life of Buddhist monk.635
The logical inconsistencies between the positive image of Piola as a saint and his
condemnation multiply. Piolas misdeed and punishment as described in the vinaya do
not really make sense, as Piolas story is itself, according to Strong, the occasion for the
formulation of the vinaya rule in the first place. He is blamed for an infraction against a rule
that was not even in existence at the time of his act.636
Providing an interesting counterpoint to more idealized social contract narratives, Girard
locates complicity in the death of innocent reconciliatory victims at the very foundation of law
and order. Girards theory on the mechanism of reconciliatory victims can explain this logical
inconsistencies in the image of Piola. He, far from being gluttonous for himself, is
gluttonous for others. He can be so precisely because he has no attachment or desire for the
food he receives, but seeks it only for the sake of letting others make merit. He is condemned to
remain in this world until the arrival of Maitreya, and then only will he be able to enter
Parinirva. Piolas not entering Nirvna is presented as a banishment, a punishment for his
misdeed. It is as a result of his own violation of the Vinaya. Most interestingly, he is
condemned to become what a bodhisattva is a maintainer of the Dharma and a field of merit
for others until the end of the age. Piola is condemned to wander for all time, a
mysterious outsider who occasionally appears here and there in this world.637
Piola, as Faure638 has argued, seems to play here the role of a scapegoat. By way of
unveiling scapegoat mechanism around Piola, an ideal representative of the average Buddhist
monks, we can maintain that Buddhist world-renouncer seems to play the role of reconciliatory
victims. In spite (or because) of his gluttony, Pindola represents the ideal (or better; the double)
of the monk.639 Criticism of Piolas is, according to Ray, curious because, in some important
respects, it sets up contradictions in the texts. It appears that the vinaya criticizes Piola
precisely because he is, and shows himself to be, a saint in the classical mold.640

634
635
636
637
638
639
640

Ibid., 61, 66-7, 75, 87.

Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights. An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition, 174.
Ray, Buddhist Saints in India. A Study in Buddhist Values & Orientations, 158, n. 26.
Strong, The Legend of the Lion-roarer: A Study of the Buddhist Arhat Piola Bh radvja, 66, 77-8.
Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy. A Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism, 103.
Faure, Visions of Power. Imagining Medieval Japanese Buddhism, 89.
Ray, Buddhist Saints in India. A Study in Buddhist Values & Orientations, 158.

126

This mechanism of transference between world-renouncer and householder could be best

understood in the sense of hidden, generative surrogate victim mechanism that dominates
culture unconsciously. Girard speaks of the violent nature of mimetism. Girard shows that it is
at the root of all institutions, which are based on the scapegoat mechanism. There is a point
when mimetic violence, in which each imitates the other and becomes the others rival for
acquisition of increasingly symbolic objects, is so widespread in a group beginning to emerge
that the group unconsciously avoids self-destruction by polarizing its violence around an
individual who is a little more noticeable or disturbing. Mimesis is thus both the cause of the
crisis and the means of resolving it. The victim is always made divine after the sacrifice. The
myth is thus the lie that hides the founding lynching, which speaks to us about the gods, but
never about the victims that the gods used to be. Rituals then repeat the initial sacrifice, and
repetition of rituals gives birth to institutions, which are the only means that humanity has found
to postpone the apocalypse.641

5. Positive Mimesis and Problem of Imitation

5.1. Transgression of the Buddhas and Bodhisattvas
In spite of this repeated emphasis on the fundamental goodness of mimetic desire, Girard
continues to speak more about acquisitive and conictual mimetic structures than about positive
and peaceful mimesis. Because of the world-renoucing charateristics of Buddhism, it is not easy
to find and develop positive mimesis. In her discussion of the problem of imitation, 642
OFlaherty maintains that the gods rank above mankind, and are therefore not to be imitated,
but the enlightened man (and sometimes the Brahmin) also ranks above mankind and may
behave immorally without suffering the consequences of his action. The doctrine of imitation
was more often rejected and criticized for the abuses it encouraged than accepted as dogma.643
The transgressive Buddhist Siddhas also "fought" "violently those who sought to imitate
them."644
Kleine 645 had dealt with the problem caused by the imitation of the (transgressive)
Bodhisattva: Offences against the four most important rules (prjika-dharmas), which include
641

Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoit Chantre, 22.

See Wendy Doniger OFlaherty, The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London:
University of California Press, 1980), chapter 3. The Problem of Imitation (286-309).
643
Ibid., 289.
644
Bareau, Der indische Buddhismus, 180.
645
Christoph Kleine, ble Mnche oder wohlttige Bodhisattvas? ber Formen, Grnde und Begrndungen
organisierter Gewalt im japanischen Buddhismus, in Zeitschrift fr Religionswissenschaft 11 (2003), 246-7.
642

127

the prohibition of intentional killing of a people, were considered acceptable if a bodhisattva has
committed on the basis of his three outstanding qualities, namely, skilled means (upyakaualya), in wisdom and compassion. Asaga has noted in his Bodhisattva-bhmi-stra that is
extremely influential for the development of Mahyna ethics, that "a bodhisattva is perfectly
permissible, indeed necessary, (erlaubt, je geradezu geboten), to kill a man who is about to
kill sentient beings or to injure a monk, a pratyekabuddha or a bodhisattva." "The act of killing
brings no negative karmic consequences in this case, but brings great merit. "According to
Mahyna view, any (transgressive) acts of a Bodhisattva must be judged by the upya- theory,
that is to say, no matter how any seemingly morally reprehensible actions may serve a higher
purpose, which is not always recognized by the normal average person." Accorindgo to
Dasgupta, we find in the Tattva-siddhi, - if a woman falls passionately in love with a
Bodhisattva and if she be about to sacrifice her life for him, it is the bounden duty of the
Bodhisattva to save her life by satisfying her. So the Bodhisattva should transgress the law
even of the ten kinds of meritorious deed for the sake of others. It has been repeatedly said in
many of the texts that there is nothing in the world, which a Bodhisattva-yogin should not do
for the sake of beings.646
Buddhism, according to Faure, is all too often reduced to an ethic or disillusioned
rationalism. That is true in particular of the Neobuddhism spread these days by those who
favor a doctrine better adapted to the modern world and purged of all its cosmological
elements. According to them, the Buddha was an eminently pragmatic sage who recommended
tolerance and a kind of pre-Stoicism. However, Faure argues, although morality may be one of
the components of the Buddhist doctrine, it is neither the only nor the principal one. Historically,
Buddhism is massively esoteric, even fundamentally superstitious.647 The transgressive
amoralism of sacred Buddhas and Bodhisattvas should be interpreted in the light of surrogate
victim mechanism.
The Greeks also never suggested we imitate the gods. They always say that Dionysus should
be kept at a distance and that one should never go close to him. But Christ is approachable from
this point of view. The Greeks had no model of transcendence to imitate. According to Girard,
that was their problem, and it is the problem of archaic religions. For them, absolute violence is
good only in cathartic memory, in sacrificial repetition. 648 The sacred and transgressive
Buddhist Bodhisattvas heroic deeds so exceed the capabilities of average people, that for the
majority of their supporters, Bodhisattvas are more likely savior who can plead for help, as
models to be imitated.649

646
647
648
649

Dasgupta, An Introduction to Tntric Buddhism, 186, n.3.

Faure, Double Exposure: Cutting Across Buddhist and Western Discourses, 77.
Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoit Chantre, 101.
Bareau, Der indische Buddhismus, 148.

128

In the sense of the "last symbolic unity of the victims" that summarizes the entire religious
history of mankind,650 mimetic theory helps us to deepen "comparisons between the ideal of the
Bodhisattva and Christ" in the "phenomenological approach."651 The similarity between Christ
and Bodhisattva was commonly pointed out in the Buddhist-Christian studies.652 The image of
Jesus suggests that of a bodhisattva, the embodiment of selfless compassion for sentient
beings.653 Whereas Bodhisattvas are free of the attachment to self owing to their insight into the
Emptiness of persons and all things, Jesus was, according to Keel, free of preoccupation with
himself owing to his complete trust in the God of unconditional love.654
Some Buddhists believe Jesus Christ was a bodhisattva. The comparison between the
Bodhisattva ideal and Christ in the phenomenological approach655 can be radicalized in the
sense of the symbolic unity of the reconciliatory victims that encompasses the entire religious
history of humanity.656 Paradox of world-constructing world-renunciation in Buddhism can be
well explained by the mimetic theory of Ren Girard. Through the radical (social-)
anthropological rereading of Buddhist emptiness and nothingness as the sacrificial values and
dharma of the world-renouncer, we can interpret the founding, differentiating and worldconstructing role of Buddhist world-renouncer in terms of the reconciliatory victims. In the light
of scapegoat mechanism, the tragic and the dionysian surrounding (radical) world-renouncer can
be read and decoded.657 Unlike Buddhas as invisible founding victim, according to Girard,
Christ is an unsuccessful scapegoat whose heroic willingness to die for the truth will
ultimately make the entire cycle of satanic violence visible to all people and therefore
inoperative.658
The idea of the saintly madman is a well-established stereotype in Tibet.659 Apart
from lamas such as Drugnyn (Drugpa Kunleg) and Tsangnyn, who are explicitly referred to
650

Ren Girard, Wenn all das beginnt. Ein Gesprch mit Michel Treguer. Aus dem Franzsischen von Pascale
Veldboer (Mnster-Hamburg-London: Thaur, 1997), 161.
651
Von Brck and Lai, Buddhismus und Christentum. Geschichte, Konfrontation, Dialog, 321;
652
Robert A. F. Thurman, The Buddhist Messiahs: The Magnificent Deeds of the Bodhisattvas, in The Christ and
the Bodhisattva, ed. Donald S. Lopez, Jr. Steven and C. Rockefeller (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1987 ).
653
Hee-Sung Keel, Jesus the Bodhisattva: Christology from a Buddhist Perspective, Buddhist-Christian Studies 16
(1996) : 169-185 ; and see Donald S. Lopez Jr. and Steven C. Rockefeller, eds., The Christ and the Bodhisattva
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987 ).
654
Keel, Jesus the Bodhisattva: Christology from a Buddhist Perspective, 175-76
655
Von Brck and Lai, Buddhismus und Christentum. Geschichte, Konfrontation, Dialog, 321.
656
Ren Girard, Wenn all das beginnt. Ein Gesprch mit Michel Treguer. trans. Pascale Veldboer (Mnster: LIT,
1997), 161. See also Die paradoxale Einheit alles Religisen in the mimetic theory of Ren Girard (Wolfgang Palaver,
Ren Girards mimetische Theorie. Im Kontext kulturtheoretischer und gesellschaftspolitischer Fragen. 3th edition
(Mnster: LIT, 2008), 307-310.
657
See Ilkwaen Chung, Paradoxie der weltgestaltenden Weltentsagung im Buddhismus. Ein Zugang aus der Sicht
der mimetischen Theorie Ren Girards, Beitrge zur mimetischen Theorie 28 (Mnster, Germany: Lit Verlag, 2010).
See 1.4.1. Transgression des Bodhisattva; 1.4.2. Bodhisattva, Christus und Feindesliebe.
658
Ren Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2001), 2.
659
Geoffrey Samuel, Civilized Shamans. Buddhism in Tibetan Societies, 302.

129

as crazy (nynpa), similar stories are also told about the behaviour of well-known figures
such as Milarepa and Tangtong Gyelpo. These saintly madmen consciously echo the crazy
behavior of some of the Tantric siddhas of India. Such figures are not confined to past centuries.
The crazy siddha (drubnyn) has remained a recognizable figure in Tibetan religious life into
modern times.660 One of the most fascinating characters that runs through the oral and literary
traditions of Tibet is a tricksterlike figure that is perpetually engaged in one sort of perverse
activity or another drinking to excess, fornicating, thieving, defying authority, playing magical
tricks. When Tibetans are questioned about the motivation and meaning of these figures, they
almost invariably say, according to Samuel, that they behave the way they do because they are
really Buddhas.661
According to Bareau,662 the "most horrific and most disgusting crimes among the "heroic
deeds" were told by the famous Siddha. "Through the (transgressive) accomplishment of such
"crimes", this representative of the festive reversal of value (Dumont) reach highest liberation
beyond good and evil: "The accomplishment of such crimes was in fact a palpable proof for that
those who perpetrated without the slightest hesitation are really free from the relative and thus
illusory notions of good and evil and therefore had reached the highest liberation. The least that
could do this magician was the transgression of the five cardinal virtues preached by the early
Buddhism, that is to say, the commission of murder, theft, adultery, perjury and
drunkenness.663
David-Neel (1960, 139-41) has written about the "cruel, immoral, contradictory to common
sense, and boundless charity of fantastic heroes" (Bodhisattva). It must be emphaisized that
none of these great Bodhisattvas has a history in the modern sense: they are all mythological
creations. kyamuni was traditionally acclaimed as the one and only Buddha of our present
world age, and early legends tell how he made the vow, when he was a brahman boy named
Megha or Sumegha, before a previous Buddha, Dpakara, to follow the self-sacrificing
bodhisattva path toward Buddhahood.664

5.2. Undifferentiating Crime of Reconciliatory Victim

660

Ibid., 304-5.
Ibid., 302-3. See also Ardussi, J. and L. Epstein. 1978. The Saintly Madman in Tibet. In J. F. Fisher, ed.,
Himalayan Anthropology: The Indo-Tibetan Interface.The Hague: Mouton.
662
Bareau, Der indische Buddhismus, 180.
663
Ibid.
664
David L. Snellgrove, Celestial Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, in Buddhism and Asian History, ed. Joseph M.
Kitagawa and Mark D. Cummings (New York: Macmillan, 1989), 375.
661

130

Based on Girards comparative anthropological studies or comparative anthropology,

we can read radical discontinuity and continuity between Christ and Bodhisattvas. We can
detect the mimetic processes of crises and violent expulsions in Buddhistl as well as in biblical
texts. The structural similarity is the basis of a radical difference from the standpoint of the
narratives identification with the victim. The multiple similarities, for Girard, guarantee the
significance of the single but decisive difference. Because of a thoroughgoing refusal of mythic
expulsions, in Christianity, God is never victimized, nor is the victim divinized.665
Not only the heroic and transgressive deeds and crimes of world-renouncing specialists of
the violent sacred (siddha), but also the exceptional breaking and transgression of Bodhisattva
in the path of initiation can be understood as the staged crimes and methodical transgression of
taboos on the side of the reconciliatory victims. The initiatory vows of Bodhisattva involves
exceptional breaking of basic moral or disciplinary precepts in order to accomplish a higher
aim. Thus, a Bodhisattva vows to abandon not committing one of the seven physical and verbal
sins. A Bodhisattva should kill a killer if that is the only way to prevent him from killing
many other people; should rob a tyrant of his country if that is the only way to deliver the
people from oppression; should commit sexual misconduct if that is the only way to save the
life of a person so distraught by passion they will otherwise kill themselves or someone else.
These are examples of exceptional licence to break the basic rules of morality in special cases
of alturistic motivation. These perverse attitudes must be present in the Bodhisattvas mind
for him or her to break one completely: he or she must consider the action fully justified in spite
of the vow, must have no resolve not to breakt it again, must be glad to break it, and must be
compleltely heedless of all consequences.666
This world-renouncer Bodhisattvas exceptional breaking of the basic rules of morality
should be understood from the perspective of genetic mechanism of surrogate victim. Oedipus
the surrogate victim is unique in at least one respect: he alone is guilty of patricide and incest.
He is presented as a monstrous exception to the general rule of mankind; he resembles nobody,
and nobody resembles him.667 By whatever sin [ordinary] beings go to lower realms, by that
same sin a yogin quickly attains success.668
Not only Buddhist texts concerning sacred Bodhisattvas, but also Sophocless two Oedipus
tragedies show a pattern of transgression and salvation long familiar to scholars. Such a
pattern is to be found in innumerable tales from folklore and mythology; in fairy stories, legends,
and even in works of literature. A source of violence and disorder during his sojourn among
men, the hero appears as a redeemer as soon as he has been eliminated, invariably by violent
665
666
667

Ren Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning. Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2001, 105-12.
Thurman, The Buddhist Messiahs: The Magnificent Deeds of the Bodhisattvas, 84-5.
Ren Girard, Violence and the Sacred, trans. Patrick Gregory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,1977),

72.
668

Elizabeth English, Vajrayogin. Her Visualizations, Rituals, and Forms. A Study of the Cult of Vajrayogin in
India. Studies in Indian and Tibetan Buddhism (Boston : Wisdom Publications, 2002), 42.

131

means.669
A Chan master called upon his disciples to kill everything that stands in your way. If you
should meet the Buddha, kill the Buddha. If you should meet the Patriarchs, kill the Patriarchs.
If you should meet the arhats on your way, kill them, too. Another Chan master Hsanchien(782-865) called upon his followers to do just the ordinary things in life- to drink when
thirsty, to eat when hungry, go pass water and move the bowels, and, when tired, to take a rest.
There are neither Buddhas nor Patriarchs; Bodhidharma was only a old bearded barbarian.
kyamuni and Kyapa, Majur and Samantabhadra, are only dungheap coolies Nirvna
and bodhi are dead stumps to tie your donkeys.

670

Buddhist monks in his intiation are

required to transgress or to violate the basics rules for Buddhist world-renunciation. Worldrenouncer Bodhisattva should not hesitate to take the sins and sufferings of beings in hell.671
This transgressive or criminal acts in Buddhist initiation should be interpreted in the light of
scapegoat mechanism.
OFlaherty672 argues that the gods are said to commit serious sins in order to awaken people
to a sense of the dangers of adharma that is, as a negative moral example One might say
that the manner in which gods, for example Indra, seem to be able to perform, unscathed, acts
forbidden to Hindus bound by strict caste law functions as a kind of vicarious release, a safety
valve for his worshippers. The myth functions as the negative example of a difficult reality.
The moral dilemma arises only when the ordinary worshipper is allowed to share the gods
immunity. The god was not to be imitated by his worshippers in all his immoral actions. 673
By

giving

radically

sociological

reading

of

the

historical

forms

of

674

transcendence, mimetic theory decodes the simulated transgression of sacred and worldrenouncing Bodhisattva in his initiatory path. Faure has pointed out the ideology of
transgression and the apparent transgression of the buddhas, bodhisattvas, and saints.
Transgression constitutes a determining hagiographical motif in East Asian Buddhist chronicles.
There are two basic types of antinomianism: a naturalist or spontaneist tendency, according
to which the saints hubris places him above ordinary moral rules as in the case of Tantric or
Chan madmen; and a systematic ritual inversion of the rule.675A paradoxical justification for
Buddhist transgression appears in some Buddhist texts: one may kill, steal, and have sex to the
extent that one realizes that everything is empty.

676

669

Girard, Violence and the Sacred (New York/London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005), 91.
Kenneth K. S. Chen, Buddhism in China. A Historical Survey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), 358.
671
Winternitz, Geschichte der indischen Literatur, Band 2, 261.
672
OFlaherty, The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology, 290.
673
OFlaherty, The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology, 289-91.
674
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World: Research undertaken in collaboration with J.-M.
Oughourlian and G. Lefort, 178.
675
Bernard Faure, The Red Thread. Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998),
98, 100.
676
Faure, The Red Thread. Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality, 98, 100.
670

132

The freedom to kill, to rob, to live with total sexual licence, to lie, which is proclaimed in
so many Buddhist tantras (with varying forms of interpretation) is clearly a deliberate revesal
of the first four of the set of ten moral rules imposed upon any convert to Buddhism. The same
tantra teaches the regular moral rules as binding upon the neophyte before he should be granted
any consecration, and thus a contrast is drawn between what is suitable for the beginner and
what is permitted to the one whose perfection(siddhi) transports him above all distinctions
of whatsoever kind. Elsewhere the perverse actions are rationalized in accordance with earlier
Mahyna teachings, which allow a Bodhisattva to commit wrong actions (and willingly pay
the penalty for them by a temporary sojourn in one of the hellish abodes), if only it is for the
good of living beings. Here the perverse teachings have been arranged to fit in with the
fivefold scheme of buddhahood and in accordance with the more general Mahyna
willingness to countenance evil acts if they are committed for an ultimate good. It is likely that
the original notion was the total freedom of the perfected yogin from all social restraint, even
such universally acknowledged evils as sexual relations with anothers wife, not to mention
ones mother, sister, daughter and so on.677
Some Buddhologists and comparative philosophers have compared the Buddhist
iconoclastic antinomianism to an analogous antinomianism in Derridean deconstruction. The
late-phase Derrida is said to annul a normative ethics, replacing it with a non-institutionalized or
radically situational ethics. The doctrine of Buddha-mind is intended to teach that the
enlightened mind is the unattaced mind, so that one realizes all phenomena, good as well as bad,
pure as well as defiled, and so on, are empty, and thus equally the Buddha-nature. The Zen
master typically kept the vows, the precepts, and other prescribed norms, but Zen teaching
allowed him to violate these if such were situationally required to truly teach or
compassionate others in a given instance. 678 But sacred world-renouncers transgressiv
iconoclasm and antinomianism should be understood through the perspective of radically
situational undifferentiating and negating dharma of world-renouncer in his yogic-meditative
initiation.
The Chan school, Faure argues, was held captive in this double bind, in which monks had to
adhere strictly to the rule while being confronted with the higher model of transgression.679 A
bodhisattva might act if necessary in ways contrary to the normal rules for virtuous action,
while a fully Enlightened being is beyond the laws of karma. Tibetan myth and folklore are full
of tricksterlike figures, whose apparently immoral acts obey a higher morality. 680

677

David L. Snellgrove, Indo-Tibetan Buddhism. Indian Buddhists and Their Tibetan Successors (London: Serindia
Publications, 1987), 174-6.
678
Robert Magliola ,"Hongzhou Chan Buddhism, and Derrida Late and Early: Justice, Ethics, and Karma," in Youru
Wang, ed., Deconstruction and the Ethical in Asian Thought (New York: Routledge Press, 2007), 156-9.
679
Faure, The Red Thread. Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality, 139.
680
Geoffrey Samue, Civilized Shamans: Buddhism in Tibetan Societies (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institute,
1993), 214.

133

Undifferentiating transgression of Bodhisattvas is to be read in the light of differentiating

mechanism of scapegoat that should remain invisible if these forces are to maintain themselves.
Despite its apparent success, Chan antinomianism, as Faure argues, survived merely as an
institutionalized marginality.681
Once a monk was drafted into the legion of patriarchs his sermons would be dutifully
recorded for later study, his portraits produced in numbers to serve as objects of worship, and
his bodily remains preserved as sacred relics imbued with miraculous powers. While the
patriarch was expected to preside over a number of ceremonial events in which he ritually made
manifest his enlightenment, he had at his disposal a host of conventional rhetorical gestures
that served to denote his freedom from social, ritual, and institutional conventions. Only when a
monk had come to embody the full range of Zen ceremonial and rhetorical forms would he be
deemed qualified to assume the role of patriarch, effectively rendering him, ex-officio, a living
Buddha. Only after prolonged study under the strict guidance of seasoned monks could one be
entrusted to wield the rhetorical sword of emptiness in a manner that upheld, rather than
threatened, the long-term viability of the monastic institution. A Zen master typically manifests
his liberation in spontaneous and often antinomian behavior, accompanied by sudden shouts
or inscrutable utterances.682
Zen Budhism was often associated with the counter-culture and antinomianism pervasive
during the 1960s. Suzuki stressed the spiritual freedom that rebelled against all instituional
practices in the name of pure spontaneity. However, Chan antinomianism and iconoclam (or
biblioclam) praised by Suzuki should be understood in the sense of transgressive
undifferentiation before or for the differentiatiating mechanism of surrogate victim. According
to Faure, the apparent contradiction between Suzukis conformist stand and his earlier, more
iconoclastic interpretations suggest that his allged iconoclam was along a subtle kind of
conformism. It is an interesting feature of the Chan tradition that its radical language, aimed at
debunking an orthodoxy, soon becomes the sign or emblem of a new orthodoxy.683
Transgression of Bodhisattva is to be considered as an undifferentiating crime of
reconciliatory victims: The transgressor restores and even establishes the order he has somewhat
transgressed in anticipation. The greatest of all delinquents is, Girard maintains, transformed
into a pillar of society.684 Bodhisattvas willingness to be punished for the violent acts he
would force himself to commit685 can be well comprehended from the viewpoint of founding
mechanism that produces religion the collective transference against a victim who is first
681

Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights. An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition, 257.
Robert H. Sharf, Whose Zen ? Zen Nationalism Revisited, in James W. Heisig and John C. Maraldo(ed), Rude
Awakenings. Zen, the Kyto School, & the Question of Nationalism (Honololu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995), 423.
683
Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights. An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition, 58-9.
684
Ren Girard, The Scapegoat (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 42.
685
Gustavo Benavides, Giuseppe Tucci, or Buddholoy in the Age of Fascism, in Curators of the Buddha. The
Study of Buddhism under Colonialism, ed. Donald S. Lopez, Jr (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 176.
682

134

reviled and then sacralized. Bodhisattvas compassion is boundless, that compassion can be
made to manifest itself not just as what one would recognize as such under ordinary
circumstances, but also as what would have to be interpreted as violence. Thus actions
involving killing, even by Buddhist monks, can be considered as ultimately compassionate,
since they can be explained as restraining the victim from committing violent activities that
whould result in the perpetrator having to suffer unspeakable punishment in hell. In this context,
the Bodhisattvas self-sacrifice could be understood as his willingness to be punished for the
violent acts he would force himself to commit in order to stop someone from engaging in sinful
behavior, although, in fact, the murder of a potential murderer would be an example of
profound morality.

686

Oedipus the surrogate victim becomes the repository of all the communitys ills and
receptacle for universal shame.687 Bodhisattva is willing to transgress the norm and to be
burdened with the bad karma of killing.688 The beneficial Oedipus at Colonus supercedes the
earlier, evil Oedipus, but he does not negate him. 689
The mechanism that produces the surrogate victim is dependent on non one particular theme
because it has engendered them all. It cannot be comprehended by means of a purely thematic
or structural interpretation of the play. Because human thought has never succeeded in grasping
the mechanism of violent unanimity, it naturally turns toward the victim and seeks to determine
whether he is not somehow responsible for the miraculous consequences of his own death or
exile.

690

5.3. Christ, Bodhisattvas and the Founding Victim

Bodhisattva has been considered as a heroic example of radical altruism 691 and as
Buddhist examples of forgiveness and reconciliation.692 In tenfold list of perfections (pramit)
that the Mahyna Bodhisattva strives to specialize in forbearance is usually as the third
perfection, and it is praised to the skies in Buddhist literature. Ideally, forgiveness is absolute,
complete, and universal. Bodhisattva must forgive all types of offences (injury, insult, abuse,
criticism), everywhere (in private and in public), at all times (past, present and future).
686

Benavides, Giuseppe Tucci, or Buddholoy in the Age of Fascism, 176.

Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 77, 85.
688
Lambert Schmithausen, Zum Problem der Gewalt im Buddhismus, in Krieg und Gewalt in den Weltreligionen.
Fakten und Hintergrnde, eds.. A.T. Khoury, E. Grundmann and H.-P. Mller (Freiburg/Br.: Verlag Herder, 2003), 95.
689
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 86.
690
Ren Girard, Violence and the Sacred (New York/London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005), 8990.
691
Perry Schmidt-Leukel, "Den Lwen brllen hren" - Zur Hermeneutik eines christlichen Verstndnisses der
buddhistischen Heilsbotschaft (Paderborn : Ferdinand Schningh, 1992), 563.
692
Noel Sheth, The Buddhist Understanding of Forgiveness and Reconciliation, in Jnanadeepa: Pune Journal of
Religious Studies 6/2 (2003). See III. Some Buddhist Examples of Forgiveness and Reconciliation.
687

135

Bodhisattvas are special beings who, particularly in Mahyna, delay their salvation for the
sake of helping others, take on the suffering of others, transfer their merit to them.693
Critically examining the heroic stories of the tragic Bodhisattva in the light of hermeneutics
of suspicion inspired by Girards theory, we can decode the mechanism of reconciliatory victims
around mythological stories of Bodhisattvas absolute altruism of emptiness. The mythology
of Avalokitevara is essentially a phantasmagoric illustration of Bodhisttvas actions that
demonstrate the alturism of selflessness/emptiness. Various elements of Avalokitevaras
career and divine functions were further derived from Vedic and Brhmanical sources. The
creative powers of Brahm (the creator god), the creation of the world by means of the
cosmogonic sacrifice of Purua (the primeval person) in g Veda X, 90, and the progenerative
actions of Prajapti seem to have been borrowed from the Brhmanical tradition by Buddhists
and then apparently attributed to Avalokitevara. All of social, natural, and supernatural creation
is said to have been produced out of the various parts of Avalokitevaras body, an action fully
comparable to the gods sacrifice of Purua in g Veda X, 90, from which all creation was said
to begin. Forms and attributes of Avalokitevara may have been inspired by the cult of iva, but
there remains a distinctive buddhistic ethos to his cult and personality.694
Girards hermeneutics of suspicion can be applied to the stories about a young Chinese
woman Miao-shan as a manifestation of the bodhisattva of compassion, the so-called Goddess
of Mercy, Kuan-yin (Avalokitevara).It shows the tragic situation of a young Chinese woman as
a reconciliatory victim utterly dominated by her father and living in a context where filial piety
is the norm. Her original apparent rejection of filial piety could be understood as an
indifferentiating crime of reconciliatory victims. In the end her sacrifice makes her a model of
filial piety.695 Only the third of these daughters already married, in conduct and appearance far
transcending the ordinary, always wore dirty clothes and took but one meal a day, never eating
strongly favored food, and pursued this life of abstention and religious discipline without
faltering in her resolve. She built a hut and lived there, clothed in grass and eating from the trees,
unrecognized by anyone A Buddhist monk said to the king who are ill: If you use the arms and
eyes of one free of anger to blend into a medicine and take it, then you will be cured. The king
said: This medicine is hard to find. The monks said: No, it is not. There is a Hsiang-shan in
the south-west of Your Majestys dominion, and on the very peak of the hill is a sacred one
whose practice of religion has come to completion. This person has no anger. If you put your
request to her she will certainly make the gift. Hearing this, the sacred one gouged out her two
eyes and severed both arms with a knife, handing them over to the equerry. At that moment, the
whole earth shook. And then the sacred one was revealed as the All-merciful Bodhisattva Kuanshih-yin of the Thousand Arms and Thousand Eyes, solemn and majestic in form, radiant with
693

Sheth, The Buddhist Understanding of Forgiveness and Reconciliation, 79.

John Clifford Holt, Buddha in the Crown. Avalokitevara in the Buddhist Traditions of Sri Lanka (New
York/Oxford: Oxford University Press. 1991), 41-2.
695
John S. Strong, The Experience of Buddhism: Sources and Interpretations (Belmont CA: Wadsworth, 1994), 323.
694

136

dazzling light, lofty and magnificent, like the moon amid the stars.696
One is suffering insult and injury as a consequence of ones own evil deeds in previous
existences. 697 According to Schlingloff, it was "their own evil" that had brought the
Bodhisattva to the scene of horror. Bodhisattvas self-giving often seems "to have no other
meaning, than to demonstrate that the Bodhisattva is actually ready for any sacrifice."698
Bodhisattva accepts his self-sacrifice as the fruit of his own past deeds: Dharmavivardhana,
better known as Ku
la, was the virtuous son of King Aoka. His stepmother
yarakit
Ti
declared her burning love for him because of his beautiful eyes. On being rejected by him, she
ordered his eyes to be pulled out. But accepting this as the fruit of his own past deeds (karman),
he did not bear any malice towards her. The ideal is not even to feel anger or hatred even in the
most trying circumstances. Strictly speaking, there is nothing to forgive, for there is no offence
taken in the first place. The ideal seems to be a sort of stoic attitude of not being perturbed at all.
The ordinary person cannot reach such heights of equanimity. The emphasis in Buddhism is in
the first place on not even feeling hurt or on remaining unperturbed by even the most cruel and
vehement aggressor. In this sense, strictly speaking, there is, as Sheth argues, no need of
forgiveness for no offence has been taken! The ideal is to practice forbearance, to put up with
the trials and sufferings inflicted by others and not bear any grudge or malice toward the
opponents.699
The Bodhisattva-path begins with the arising of the bodhi-citta, the aspiration to strive for
Buddhahood for its own sake, and for the sake of helping suffering beings. The power of the
arising of the bodhi-citta is such that is generates much merit and wears out much past bad
karma. After the arising of the bodhi-citta, a person takes various Bodhisattva vows
(praidhnas) in the presence of others who live by them, or with all Buddhas and
Bodhisattvas as witness. Such vows are not taken lightly. They become a powerful autonomous
force within the psyche and lead to great demerit if broken. In general, they are seen to take
from three to thirty-three incalculable eons to fulfill.700 The uttering of this vow has profound
axiological consequences for the bodhisattva: henceforth, it will be the vow that will be the
ultimate controlling factor in ones karmic destiny, inaugurating one on a path of spiritual
perfection that will take aeons to complete. The specific contents of his vow vary from case to
case: all Bodhisattvas take certain vows in common, among which, of course, are the resolve to
postpone ones own enlightenment indefinitely while endeavoring to save others, to freely

696

Ibid., 323-5; Glen Dudbridge, ''Miaoshan on Stone: Two Early Inscriptions,'' Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies
42.2 (1982), 596-604.
697
Sheth, The Buddhist Understanding of Forgiveness and Reconciliation, 81.
698
Schlingloff, Die Religion des Buddhismus 2, Der Heilsweg fr die Welt, 73-4.
699
Sheth, The Buddhist Understanding of Forgiveness and Reconciliation, 85, 95.
700
Peter Harvey, An Introduction to Buddhism. Teachings, History and Practices (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1990), 122.

137

transfer merit to others, and so forth, but the stras also record vows specific to the great figures
of the Buddhist pantheon.701
The heroic forgiveness of mythological Bodhisattvas without anger has to be comprehended
against the background of Bodhisattvas public vows: Bodhisattva should ponder over the ill
effects of an angry and unforgiving attitude: it results in terrible punishments in various
purgatories, and wipes out the merit one has gained through several lives. Hence it is better to
bear up with the comparatively negligible sufferings inflicted on one in this life than face the
terrible tortures in the future.702 A public vow of Bodhisattva is not only self-obligation, but
also magic. "Bodhisattvas willingness to self-sacrifice to the extreme (Opferwilligkeit der
Bodhisattvas ins Extrem)703 is to be read in the light of the specific vows of the Bodhisattva. "In
his willingness to sacrifice, Bodhisattva has created a magical force. 704 Dumoulin saw
mythological richness of fantasy in Bodhisattvas vows.705
The heroic of Bodhisattvas mythological willingness to tragic self-sacrifice cannot not be
easily generalized and imitated: Whoever bears enmity even to thieves who sever ones limbs,
one by one, with a saw, does not carry out the teaching of the Buddha. Even in such a
circumstance, one should not be harsh to the thieves or hate them, but rather one should be kind
and compassionate and cultivate friendliness (mett) towards them as well as towards the whole
worldTo achieve this high ideal is no easy task, but the Bodhisattvas in particular strive to
reach this cherished goal, trying all the time not to bear malice or ill will towards anyone even
when their life is in grave danger.706 The hidden and mystified mechanisms around the
Bodhidsattvas mythological willingness to sacrifice (Hingabefreudigkeit) should be decoded.
According to Schlingloff, Bodhisattvas self-sacrifice seems to have no other meaning, than to
demonstrate that the Bodhisattva is actually ready for any sacrifice.

707

Thus mythological representation of Buddhist tragic hero Bodhisattvas could be

deconstructed in terms of sacrificial mechanism of surrogate victim. The following story could
be re-read in the light of mimetic theory. The Bodhisattvas Mekhala and Kanakhala were two
female Buddhist adepts whose story is of interest here. The two were extremely beautiful, and
attracted envious gossip, although they were quite virtuous. They were unhappy with the
pettiness of worldly people and decided not to get married after all, causing a great scandal in
the town. When the Great Adept Kanhapa came through the town they went to him, received
701

Nakamura Hajime, The Career of the Bodhisattva, in Joseph M. Kitagawa and Mark D. Cummings (ed),
Buddhism and Asian History. Religion, History, and Culture. Readings from the Encyclopedia of Religion (Mircea
Eliade, Editor in Chief), (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1987), 368.
702
Sheth, The Buddhist Understanding of Forgiveness and Reconciliation, 81.
703
Hans Wolfgang Schumann, Mahyna-Buddhismus. Die zweite Drehung des Dharma-Rades (Mnchen:
Diederichs, 1990), 170-3.
704
Schlingloff, Die Religion des Buddhismus 2, Der Heilsweg fr die Welt, 73-4.
705
Dumoulin, Begegnung mit dem Buddhismus. Eine Einfhrung, 86-7.
706
Sheth, The Buddhist Understanding of Forgiveness and Reconciliation, 80.
707
Schlingloff, Die Religion des Buddhismus 2, Der Heilsweg fr die Welt, 72-8.

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instruction in the Mother Tantra of Cakrasamvara, or Great Bliss. They were initiated into the
yoga of the female Buddha, Vajravarahi. Guru Kanhapa demanded his fee as their teacher. He
asked them for their heads. Without a moments hesitation, sharp swords emerged from the
mouths of the two women adepts. They took hold of these swords, and each cutt off her own
head and presented it to the Master. They began to dance with their heads in their hands, singing
joyously. Guru restored their heads having no trace of a wound, at which the whole town was
amazed. After many years of service and teaching, they rose bodily into the Heaven of the
Dakini Angels.

708

Unlike sacrificial world-renouncing Bodhisattvas and Buddhas, kenotic and apocalyptic

Christ revealed definitive knowledge of the mechanisms of violent foundations and radical
demystification of the sacred, of the social organizations which it sanctions. Christ, for Girard,
plunges us into knowledge of mimetic mechanisms. He thus indeed brings war not peace,
disorder not order, because all order is suspect in a way: it always hides the one whose blood
was shed in order to reconcile us. To denounce this was to disrupt the sacrificial mechanism
forever. The death of Christ, for Girard, will never have been a founding lynching, and the
resistance that people put up to the only possible model that He offers them will cause the
acceleration of history of which they will be the first victims.709
We must know a misrecognition at the basis of the sacrificial system around or against
Buddhist special beings, Bodhisattvas who strive to specialize in forbearance and take on the
suffering of others and transfer their merit to them. Thus radical altruism of this mythic and
heroic Bodhisattvas should be critically examined. For Girard, in Judaism and Christianity
sacrificial morality achieves its most refined expression. Christianity opposes all sacrifices of
an object to the self-sacrifice exemplifed by Christ a type of sacrifice that ranks as the noblest
possible form of conduct. It would of course be excessive to condemn everything put forward in
this language of sacrifice. But in the light of our analysis, we, Girard goes on to argue, are
bound to conclude that any procedure involving sacrifice, even and indeed especially when it
turns against the self, is at variance with the true spirit of the gospel texts. The Gospels never
present the rule of the Kingdom under the negative aspect of self-sacrifice. Far from being an
exclusively Christian concept, which would form the summit of altruism by contrast with an
egoism prone to sacrifice the other with gay abandon, self-sacrifice can serve to camouflage
the forms of slavery brought into being by mimetic desire. Masochism can also find
expression in self-sacrifice. What might be concealed here is the desire to sacralize oneself and
make oneself godlike which quite clearly harks back to the illusion traditionally produced by
sacrifice. The sacrificial definition, according to Girard, always emphasizes renunciation,
death, and split subjectivity. It emphasises the values that belong to the bad mother, including
the element of mimetic desire, which is identical with what Freud calls the death instinct.
708
709

Thurman, The Buddhist Messiahs: The Magnificent Deeds of the Bodhisattvas, 90-1.
Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benot Chantre, 141.

139

Sacrificial discourse cannot do justice to the crucial importance of life and the living in the
very language of the text to the fact that the child over whom the two women are quarrelling is
always described as the living child. 710 Thus we can re-read these Buddhist mythological
accounts of Bodhisattvas boundless readiness to sacrifice (grenzenlose Opferbereitschaft )711
in the ritual-sacrificial sense.

5.4. Becoming Buddhas and Imitatio Christi

From the standpoint of compassion the bodhisattva is not to be judged by the ordinary moral
standards of mankind. The bodhisattva has pledged his life for the salvation of all sentient
beings. As one Tantric text puts it, if a woman falls violently in love with a bodhisattva and is
about to sacrifice her life for him, it is the bounden duty of the bodhisattva to save her life by
satisfying all her desires. The bodhisattva never sins. For this reason, it is repeatedly stated in
the texts that there is nothing that the bodhisattva should not do for the liberation of others.712
The ik-samuccaya of ntideva asserts that the Bodhisattva may even do a deed leading to
hell, if this is a necessary part of helping someone else.713 Asangas Bodhisattva-bhmi says a
Bodhisattva may kill a person about to murder his parents or a monk, so that the assailant avoids
the evil karma of killing, which is experienced by himself instead. He may also lie to save
others, and steal the booty of thieves and unjust rulers, so that they are hindered in their evil
ways.714
The Bodhisattva do in a Christ-like fashion identity with the suffering of all humanity and
like the Christ of classical Christianity they are prepared to suffer and die for the sake of freeing
others. But there is chief difference between the predominant image of the Christ and the
image of the Bodhisattva in the predominant traditions of Mahayana Buddhism: whereas most
Buddhist sects urge the faithful to become Bodhisattvas and ultimately Buddhas, traditionally
Christians have avoided inviting the faithful to be Christs. Rather Christians are usually urged
to become members of the Body of Christ, the true church, or to pursue life in Christ. Christians
have traditionally avoided talk about becoming a Christ.

715

A bodhisattva might act if necessary in ways contrary to the normal rules for virtuous action,
while a fully enlightened being is beyond the laws of karma. Tibetan myth and folklore are full
710

Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 236-42.

Dietrich Seckel, Kunst des Buddhismus: Werden, Wanderung und Wandlung (Baden-Baden: Holle Verlag, 1964),
262.
712
Chen, Buddhism in China. A Historical Survey, 332.
713
Harvey, An Introduction to Buddhism. Teachings, History and Practices, 121.
714
Ibid., 202.
715
Donald S. Lopez Jr. and Steven C. Rockefeller, eds., The Christ and the Bodhisattva (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1987 ). 257-8.
711

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of tricksterlike figures, whose apparently immoral acts obey a higher morality. Among the
best known are Drugpa Kunleg and the epic hero Gesar of Ling, whose activities are frequently
devious and treacherous according to the rules of ordinary morality, but always legitimated by
a higher spiritual purpose. Even Aku Tnpa, the well-known trickster-hero of bawdy and
risqu folk stories, is occasionally claimed as a Buddhist saint.716 A trickster reflects, says
Girard, the representational distortions rooted in the catharsis of minor scapegoating.
Tricksters are simultaneously bad and good. The good trickster always makes up for the damage
that he has done in his capacity as a bad trickster.717
Korea is familiar with these eccentric monks, who seem to pay no attention to moral
values and enjoy provoking scandals. A contemporary case in point is that of the painter-monk
Jung-kwang, a living Buddha according to some, a demon according to others. When
accused of the worst transgression, Jung-kwang merely replies that he is a Buddhist mop,
which cleans everything while getting itself dirty . 718 The reconciliatory victim cleans
everything while getting itself dirty. In Girards theory, the word katharsis refers primarily to
the mysterious benefits that accrue to the community upon the death of a human katharma or
pharmakos. The process is generally seen as a religious purification and takes the form of
cleansing or draining away impurities. Shortly before his execution the human scapegoat
pharmakos is paraded ceremonially through the streets of the village. It is believed that he will
absorb all the noxious influences that may be abroad and that his death will transpose them
outside the community. Girard saw Oedipus in terms of his polluted presence, as a receptacle
for universal shame.719
Trickster figure named Jigong, who himself is the antithesis of purity, is called as
Vagabond Buddha or the Living Buddha. This Buddha is set apart from other gods by his
sense of humor, his fondness for Guiness Stout, and his identity as the dirthy Buddha(Lasam
hut). This Buddha is characterized by his taste for dogmeat, and Guiness is called Black Dog in
Hokkien. The Vagabond Buddha, as a Buddhist who never fasts, eats meat, drinks, gambles, and
steals, who is dirthy rather than pure, is a trickster figure who inverts normal social and
religious values. He also appears to be viewed as a social bandit. In the process of the trance
performance around this Buddha, then, structure is inverted to create an antistructural world
in which a Buddha is impure, the government is evil, and the socially marginal activities of the
group are deemed good. In so doing, anti-structure is for a time transformed into structure.720
The essential difference between these ideals of the autarky of the world-renouncer and
the European ideals (Christian monasteries as an example), is that they cannot be a model for a
716

Samuel, Civilized Shamans. Buddhism in Tibetan Societies, 214.

Ren Girard, A Theatre of Envy: William Shakespeare (London: Gracewing & New Malden, UK: Inigo
Enterprises, 2000), 237.
718
Faure, The Red Thread. Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality, 7.
719
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 85, 287.
720
Jean DeBernardi, The God of War and the Vagabond Buddha , in Modern China, 13/3 (1987), 328-30.
717

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whole community or society. It is necessarily a rejection of society (in a way which

presupposes its continuing existence) and not a model for it.721 Dumoulin722 has pointed out not
only the striking similarities in appearance and forms, but also fundamental differences in the
motivations" between the (Zen) Buddhism and Christian spirituality. The similarities lie more
on the surface. Christianity means a gradual revelation of the scapegoat as the foundation of th
sacred, of ethics, of aesthetics and of culture in general. 723 Violent paradox of worldconstructing Buddhist world-renunciation could be explained in the sense of the cultural
mechanisms that conceal violence

5.5. Explanatory Potential of Social Anthropological Approach

Almond argues that there was an imaginative creation of Buddhism in the first half of the
nineteen century, and that the Western creation of Buddhism progressively enabled certain
aspects of Eastern cultures to be defined, delimited, and classified. Buddhism, for Almond, is
part of a broader discourse about the Orient such as has been brought to light by Edward Said in
his book Orientalism. Buddhism, by 1860, had come to exist, not in the Orient, but in the
Oriental libraries and institutes of the West, in its texts and manuscripts, at the desks of the
Western savants who interpreted it. Almond argues that Buddhism had become a textual
object, defined, classified, and interpreted through its own textuality. By the middle of the
century, the Buddhism that existed out there was beginning to be judged by a West that alone
knew what Buddhism was, is, and ought to be. The essence of Buddhism came to be seen as
expressed not out there in the Orient, but in the West through the Wests control of
Buddhisms own textual past. Buddhism revealed textually was almost universally contrasted
favourably with Buddhism as it was in reality. The image of decay, decandence, and
degeneration emerged as a result of the possibility of contrasting an ideal textual Buddhism of
the past with its contemporary Eastern instances. The Victorian creation of an ideal textual
Buddhism was a key component in the rejection of Buddhism in the East. Textualization of
Buddhism permitted the emergence of the historical Buddha and the convenient opposition
between a pure, canonical, early Buddhism and the degenerate Buddhist religion of
contemporary Asia.724
This work is concerned with the cultural theoretical understanding of the specific dialectic
between world order and world-renunciation in Buddhist civilization that are not to be confused
with the moralistic judgmental or discrediting of the violence-reducing and peace-making
721

Laidlaw, Riches and Renunciation: Religion, Economy, and Society among the Jains, 361.
Dumoulin, stliche Meditation und christliche Mystik, 259.
723
Girard, Job: The Victim of His People, 72.
724
Philip C. Almond, The British Discovery of Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 4-5,
13,25, 37-40.
722

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potential of Buddhist (world-) renunciatory wisdom. Tambiahs social anthropological

understanding of Buddhist society is one example. Tambiah is recognized for penetrating and
deep social-anthropological analysis of the fundamental problems of ethnic violence in South
East Asia and original studies on the dynamics of Buddhist societies that have opened the way
to an innovative social-anthropological approach to the internal dynamics of Buddhist
civilizations In his book, Buddhism Betrayed ?: Religion, Politics, and Violence in Sri Lanka,
Tambiah seeks to answer the question of how the Buddhist monks in today's Sri Lanka, in spite
of Buddhism's traditionally nonviolent philosophy, participated in the fierce political violence of
the Sinhalese against the Tamils.
In his book, Leveling Crowds: Ethnonationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in South
Asia, he has pointed out a process that Girard has elaborated on in Violence and the Sacred: the
internal divisiveness and conflicts within a group or collectivity may drive its members to seek
out a scapegoat and sacrificially kill it to gain its own uncertain unity, making of this cleansing a
sacred act of generative unanimity and duty.725 Tambiahs social anthropological analysis
concerning paradoxical unity of world-conqueror and world-renouncer can be furthered by the
understanding of the paradoxically violent paradox of world-constructing and world-conquering
world-renunciation and world-renouncer illuminated by the mimetic theory. Girard has tried to
demonstrate that generative violence penetrates all forms of mythology and ritual.

6.

Intercultural Mimesis

6.1.

Intercultural Mimesis and Buddhist Studies

The intriguing results generated by the use of Girards interpretative scheme when applied
to the analysis of intercultural relations pose interesting challenges to social theorists and
liberals. The rise of modern egalitarianism as a modern democratic dogma has caused the
omnipresence of intercultural mimesis and led to the double-bound mushrooming of envy,
resentment, and violence between cultural groups726and to the envy society. The accompanying
rise of indifferentiating egalitarianism has tended to produce an intense degree of tension,
passion and envy at the intercultural interface. Girards Fundamental Anthropology offers one
of the most groundbreaking analyses of the dynamics of quasi-osmotic mimesis, envy and
resentment in modern times with its new intensity and complexity of cultural interpenetration

725

Stanley J. Tambiah, Leveling Crowds. Ethnonationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in South Asia (Berkeley/
Los Angeles/ London: University of California Press, 1996), 277.
726
Paul Laurent and Gilles Paquet, Intercultural Relations: A Myrdal-Tocqueville-Girard Interpretative Scheme, in
International Political Science Review / Revue internationale de science politique 12 (1991), 176.

143

and mixing. This anthropological mechanism operates not only at the inter-individual level, but
also at the intercultural level: the greater the intercultural differences in wealth and power, in
the face of decreed rights to equality, the greater the envy and the resentment as Tocqueville
explained.727
Hybridity, vulnerability, ambivalence and mimicry in post-colonial studies are new concepts
asking for the complex hermeneutics in the pluralistic world. Post-colonial studies, hybrid
identity construction, ethnology and cultural studies become a new theory-setting for the
intercultural hermeneutics. 728 There are comparisons to be drawn between the girardian
appropriation mimesis and a theorist of post-colonialism, Homi Bhabhas notion of mimicry.729
Mimesis is central to those who explore the contact zone between differences, hybridity,
everyday realities of cultural mixing and the ongoing process of intercultural borrowing at the
borders between different cultures. In order to comprehend the intercultural complexities in this
pluralistic globalized world, it would be helpful to draw attention to what Charles Hallisey has
called intercultural mimesis a phrase denoting the cultural interchange that occurs between the
native and the Orientalist in the construction of Western knowledge about the Orient.
According to Richard King, Orientalism can never be unilinear projection of the Western
imagination and projections onto a colonized and passive Orient, since it always involves a
degree of intercultural mimesis. He has rightly emphasized the necessity of more complex
hermeneutics for the comprehension of the polyphonic trajectories that result from this
interactive process manifest the diverse ways in which Orientalist discourses develop.730 The
religious pluralism seems to overlook the lacunae in this dynamic process of intercultural
mimesis, namely the failure of the West to recognize its own reflections in the mirror being
held out to it.731
Based on a variety of and post-colonial and post-structuralist thinkers, such as Foucault,
Gadamer, Said, and Spivak, King rightly shows how religion needs to be re-described along the
lines of cultural studies. Philip Almonds pioneering study of the invention of Buddhism in the
nineteenth century732 also provides a model for future endeavors not only in the field of
political hermeneutics or semiotics of the myths of power, and knowledge,733 but also in the
field of new discourse on intercultural mimesis and Orientalism. Another book Curators of the
727

Ibid.
Ulrich Winkler, Zentrum Theologie Interkulturell und Studium der Religionen an der Universitt Salzburg
theologische Konzeption, Salzburger Theologische Zeitschrift 11 (2007), 62.
729
Patrick Imbert, The Girardian Appropriation Mimesis, the Platonic Mimesis and Bhabhas Mimicry: The passion
for controlling representation in http://www.uibk.ac.at/theol/cover/events/innsbruck2003_Imbert_Paper.doc).
730
King, Orientalism and Religion. Postcolonial Theory, India and the Mystic East, 155-6.
731
Ibid., 156.
732
Philip Almond, The British Discovery of Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
733
Kenneth Surin, A Politics of Speech. Religious Pluralism in the Age of the McMonalds Hamburger, Gavin
DCosta, ed., Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered. The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology of Religions (Maryknoll, NY:
Orbis Books, 1990), 206.
728

144

Buddha. The Study of Buddhism under Colonialism is an important work to draw buddhist
studies into the larger arena of post-colonial cultural studies and to trace the genealogies and the
logics of representation of orientalist buddhology.
The problematic of Orientalism and post-colonial cultural studies is increasingly discussed
in the intercultural and inter-religious hermeneutics.734 As John Milbank rightly observes, the
other religions were taken to be species of the genus religion by Christian thinkers who
systematically subsumed alien cultural phenomena under categories which comprise western
notions of what constitutes religious thought and practice. These false categorizations connected
with the usual construal of religion as a genus embodying covert Christianizations have often
been (mimetically) accepted by Western-educated representatives of the other religions
themselves, who are, (because of the intercultural mimesis), unable to resist the politically
imbued rhetorical force of Western discourse.735
Supported by Nirad C. Chaudhuri and not falsely, Milbank take a few examples: John Hick
can speak of many roads to salvation, yet Eastern religions do not seek deliverance by divine
grace from a sinful or merely natural condition. The Hindu practice of bhakti is frequently
represented as an instance of worship, when in fact it is mainly concerned with a systematic
appeasement of, and seeking of favors from, the various deities. The Eastern religions are often
seen as highly mystical and spiritual in character, yet the practices, as Milbank rightly points out,
misallocated to these exclusively Christian categories are not concerned with a quest for
beatitude or unity with the godhead, but with attainment of worldly power and liberation
of/from the self.736
For the dynamic understanding of the Dialectical Image: A Cross-Cultural Play of Mimesis
and Misrepresentation737 , the more complex and dramatic hermeneutics for the critique of the
politics of representations as a whole in this mimetic process are required. In a discussion of
modern constructions of Zen Buddhism, Robert Sharf has written about an irony in the
intercultural dialog: The irony is, according to him, that the Zen that so captured the imagination
of the West was in fact a product of the New Buddhism of the Meiji. Moreover, those aspects of
Zen most attractive to the Occident the emphasis on spiritual experience were derived in
large part from Occidental sources. Like Narcissus, Western enthusiasts failed to recognize
their own reflection in the mirror being held out to them, remarks Sharf. This ironical
734

For example, ESITIS (European Society for Intercultural Theology and Interreligious Studies) Conference
Salzburg 2009, 15th - 18th April 2009 Interreligious Hermeneutics in pluralistic Europe, 6th Section: Is
interreligious hermeneutics possible in the light of postcolonial deconstruction of religion?
(http://www.sbg.ac.at/tkr/events/ESITIS-2009/ESITIS-2009-Salzburg-program.pdf).
735
John Milbank, The End of Dialoge, in Gavin DCosta, ed., Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered. The Myth of a
pluralistic Theology of Religions (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1990), 176.
736
Ibid.
737
Hugh B. Urban, Tantra. Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2003), 14.

145

phenomenon might be well understood in light of the mimetic theory, particularly in the sense of
intercultural mimesis. Calling attention to the issue of radical decontextualization of the Zen
tradition, Sharf argued correctly that Asian apologists, convinced that Zen was making
significant inroads in the West, failed to recognize the degree to which Zen was therapeutized
by European and American enthusiasts and Western enthusiasts systematically failed to
recognize the nationalist ideology underlying modern Japanese constructions of Zen.738

6.2. Orientalism and Protestant Buddhism

As Bernard Faure739 rightly observed, the Western understanding of Zen is informed by the
entire orientalist tradition that gave rise to the various disciplines that define the space of Zen
studies in Western culture and in particular by the circumstances of the Western reception of
Buddhism. For this reason, the general questions raised by Said in his work, Orientalism, are
especially relevant for the field of Zen studies. Western perception of Zen is necessarily
mediated by Orientalist categories, which at work even in the nativist discourse of a Japanese
scholar like D. T. Suzuki.740 In the light of the dramatic understanding of the latent operation of
(quasi-osmotic) mimesis at the intercultural level, the inverted Zen Orientalism can be properly
comprehended: Zen Orientalism represents, according to Faure, reverse, or inverted
Orientalism or secondary Orientalism which constitutes a subspecies of Japanese nativism
predicated on an inversion of Orientalist schemas. Zen mysticism and Zen Orientalism appears
as an ideological instrument to promote a cultural image of Japan in the West und as an essential
component of the so-called cultural exceptionalism (Nihonjinron).741 Some Western scholars
romanticized Zen mysticism, which was subsequently re-exported to Japan 742 and was
mimetically appropriated.
The popular lay image of Zen, notably the notion that Zen refers not to a specific school
of Buddhism but rather to a mystical or spiritual gnosis that transcends sectarian boundaries,
is largely a twentieth-century construct.743 In comparison to the tendency to isolate Asian
religions into compartments of Orientalism or spiritualism or mysticism, an increasingly selfconscious post-orientalist Buddhist studies begins to understand Buddhism in the light of
postcolonial cultural studies, cultural and social anthropology, literary criticism and art history.
In Germany this shift of Asian studies to cultural and social science studies is also taking

738

Robert H. Sharf, The Zen of Japanese Nationalism, in History of Religions 33/1 (1993), 39.
Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights. An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition, 5.
740
Ibid., 267.
741
Ibid., 5-9, 86.
742
Yoko Arisaka, The Nishida Enigma: the Principles of the New World Order (1943), in Monumenta Nipponica
51/1 (1996), 6.
743
Sharf, Whose Zen ? Zen Nationalism Revisited, 44.
739

146

place.744 The auto-orientalism of East copying, internalizing and appropriating the western
Orientalism is critically examined.745 This new approach of post-orientalist Buddhist studies
with its sensitivity for the dynamic complexities in the intercultural mixing and borrowing
would be recommendable for the pluralistic theology of religions, for comparative religionists,
and for those interested in interfaith dialogues, who all too often uncritically accept Zen
Orientalism.
The Protestant Buddhism as a new kind of Buddhism also could be well explained from the
standpoint of the more complex and dramatic hermeneutics inspired by the mimetic theory of
Girard, particularly in terms of the intercultural mimesis. Protestant Buddhism in Theravda
Buddhism both originated as a protest (against Christianity) and itself reflects (mimetically)
Protestantism.746 Sharf also analyzed the element of intercultural mimesis in the process of
refashioning of Buddhism in the image of Christianity: According to him, the Theravda
reforms, like the Buddhist reforms in Japan, must be considered in the context of the major
ideological changes precipitated by the forces of urbanization, modernization, and the spread of
Western style education, all of which contributed to the rise of Protestant Buddhism.747Like
Meiji New Buddhism in Japan, Theravda Buddhism was refashioned in the image of postEnlightenment Christianity by emphasizing the values of individualism, which included the
affirmation of worldly achievement coupled with this-worldly asceticism and by repudiating the
supernatural or magical or ritual aspect of Buddhism.748
The contemporary trend of Buddhist revivalism in Sri Lanka that has been labelled
Protestant Buddhism by scholars such as Gananath Obeyesekere and Richard Gombrich is
represented in scholarly writings as an example of the Westernization of Buddhism that is,
as a purely Western phenomenon. However, the mimetic ambiguity of Protestant Buddhism
is captured well by the epithet itself.749 Robert Sharf and others has conclusively demonstrated
that D. T. Suzukis version of Zen is itself a modern construction implicated in Japanese
nationalist discourse of the Mejji period. What is lost in this mimetic process,, is a critique of
the politics of representations as a whole.750 The process of intercultural mimesis can also be
exemplified by examining the relationship between the emerging protestant trends in
Sinhalese Buddhism of the late nineteenth century and contemporaneous debates in the West
concerning the relationship between religion and science.

751

The invention of a Buddhist wedding ceremony is to be considered as an example of

744

Kollmar-Paulenz and Prohl, Einfhrung: Buddhismus und Gewalt, 146.

Christoph Kleine, ble Mnche oder wohlttige Bodhisattvas? ber Formen, Grnde und Begrndungen
organisierter Gewalt im japanischen Buddhismus, in Zeitschrift fr Religionswissenschaft 11 (2003), 241.
746
Gombrich 1988: 174. See Chapter Seven. Protestant Buddhism (pp. 172-197).
747
Robert H. Sharf, Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience, Numen 42 (1995), 251.
748
Ibid., 252.
749
King, Orientalism and Religion. Postcolonial Theory, India and the Mystic East, 150.
750
Ibid., 159-60.
751
Ibid., 151.
745

147

mimetic Protestant Buddhism. The invention of a Buddhist wedding ceremony is ascribed to

the time of Prince Siddhrtha himself, though we know not only that it is new but also that it
goes against the tradition that Buddhist sacralia play no part in life-cycle ceremonies except at
death.752Traditionally the only life-crisis ceremonies that concerned Buddhist monks were those
connected with death; birth, puberty, marriage, etc., were strictly secular affairs. An even more
important aspect of Christian influence on the Buddhist monks role performance is to demand
that Buddhist monks now bless and even officiate at all kinds of undertakings with which they
have not traditionally and customarily been associated.753
Orientalism, can never be unilinear projection of the Western imagination onto a colonized
and passive Orient, since it always involve a degree of intercultural mimesis. Critics of
Orientalism from Said onwards have been quick to point to the lacunae in this process namely
the failure of the West to recognize its own reflections in the mirror being held out to it.754
According to Faures analysis of the rise of Zen Orientalism, 755 despite their different
intellectual itineraries, both Suzuki and Nishida were still speaking from within the discursive
arena opened by Western Orientalism. That is to say, their description of Zen is in many respects
an inverted image of that given by the Christian missionaries, and they relied on Christian
categories even when rejecting them.756

6.3. Decontextualization of World-renouncers Meditation

The category experience has played a cardinal role in modern studies of Buddhism. Both
historical and ethnographic evidence suggests that the privileging of experience may well be
traced to certain twentieth-century Aisan reform movements, notably those that urge a return
to zazen or vipassan meditation, and these reforms were profoundly influenced by religious
movements in the West. Even in the case of those contemporary Buddhist scholars that do exalt
meditative experience, ethnographic data belies the notion that the rhetoric of meditative
states functions ostensively.757 The laicized styles of Zen might be called, to borrow a notion
from Obeyesekere, Protestant Zen in so far as they strive to rationalize Zen practice
through minimizing the importance of the ritualistic dimensions of practice in favor of an
instrumental or goal-directed approach.758
Meditation had traditionally comprised the reenactment of the Buddhas world-renouncing

752
753
754
755
756
757
758

Gombrich and Obeyesekere, Buddhism Transformed. Religious Change in Sri Lanka, 449.
Ibid., 228.
King, Orientalism and Religion. Postcolonial Theory, India and the Mystic East, 156.
Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights. An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition, chapter 2. p. 8-9.
Ibid., 53.
Sharf, Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience, 228.
Ibid., 250.

148

exertions through the ritual recitation of meditational activities. Such exercises were typically
performed in order to acquire merit and attain a more fortunate rebirth. The vipassan revival,
coupled with theProtestant

ideology of the Theravda reforms, had the effect of

rationalizing meditation. Meditation was now conceived not as the ritual instantiation of
Buddhahood, nor as a means to accumulate merit, but rather as a mental discipline designed to
engender a particular transformative experience. As Sharf argues, the rationalization of
meditation, coupled with the Westernized values of the middle-class patrons of urban
meditation centers led naturally to a deemphasis on the traditional soteriological, in other
words, world-renouncing goal- bringing an end to rebirth. Instead, we find an increasing
emphasis on the worldly benefits of meditation: vipassan was said to increase physical and
psychological health, to alleviate stress, to help one deal more effectively with family and
business relationships, and so on. Buddhist traditionally held that meditation was a risky
business that should be undertaken only under proper supervision, i.e., within the confines of
the world-renouncing sagha. Prior to the modern period there was virtually no opportunity for
layperson to study meditation. Meditation practice was rare even within the sagha. Yet in the
new climate of Protestant Buddhism, eminent meditation masters rushed to provide facilities
for lay practitioners. In order to compete, even the more tradionally minded temples were often
obliged to offer meditation classes for their lay patrons. 759 Buddhist meditation was an
originally risky and sacrificial activity of world-renouncing specialist of the sacred and
representative of Dionysian festivals and its reversal of values. The vast majority of Theravda
monks still consider their vocation to lie in ganthadhura or teaching, rather than
vipassandhura or meditation.760
The Buddhist, like other Indian traditions, holds that a meditation teacher must exercise
constant supervision because to embark on this uncharted sea by oneself is dangerous and
may lead to mental derangement. There has traditionally been little institutional support for
lay meditation.761 The word Zen commonly conjures up images of austere black-robed
monks wholly intent upon reaching enlightenment (satori) through the practice of
introspective meditation under a strict master. But such a image is in part the product of
twentieth-century Japanese intellectuals who appropriated exegetical strategies borrowed from
the West in their effort to rationalize Japanese Buddhism. Japanese Zen apologists, conversant
in contemporary Western philosophy, emphasized, Sharf says, the role of religious experience in
order to counter the threat posed to Buddhism by modernization, secularization, and science.
But traditional Chan and Zen practice was oriented not towards engendering enlightenment
experiences, but rather to perfecting the ritual performance of Buddhahood.762
Seated meditation in medieval Zen should be probably be interpreted not as a form of
759
760
761
762

Ibid., 257-9.
Ibid., 242.
Gombrich and Obeyesekere, Buddhism Transformed. Religious Change in Sri Lanka, 451.
Ibid., 243.

149

introspection but rather as a ritual re-presentation of the original awakening of the

Buddha. 763 Faure also rightly criticizes Suzuki for perpetuating a misunderstanding of
unconsciousness in the tradition by means of his psychological interpretation of satori, for his
reliance on categories of nineteenth-century Orientalism. Satori should be understood within the
context of world-renouncers psychology in his yogic-meditative initiation.
According to King,764

the problem with Suzukis decontextualization (and to some extent

Vednticization) of Zen, was that neither Japanese nor Western enthusiasts were able to see the
ideological motivations or multiple consequences of abstracting traditional Zen doctrines and
practices from their local and institutional contexts.
Meditation of Buddhist (radical) world-renouncer was originally sacrificial rather than
psychotherapeutic.

In

spite

of

its

psychotherapeutic
765

(psychotherapeutischen Nebenwirkungen der Meditation),

side-effect

of

meditation

the originally world-renouncing

dimension of Buddhist meditation is no to be overlooked. But protestant Buddhists, beginning

with Dharmapla, have encouraged schoolchildren to go to the temples on holy days to
participate in the meditation. But one of the commonest traditional topics of meditation on such
occasions is the loathsomeness of the body. Gombrich/Obeyesekere 766 have raised the
question whether it is equally harmless for children to emulate those who have done with the
world in systematically attempting to acquire a distaste for the body. The contemplation of the
corpse as a symbol of impermance was exalted in early Buddhism. Thus the world-renouncing
nature of Buddhist meditation on the loathsomeness of the (female) body should not be
overlooked.
The recent trends in Southeast Asian Buddhism which could be understood as a
protestantizing seem paradoxical, if not contradictory: increasingly active lay leadership and
the veneration of monks to whom supernatural powers are ascribed; a revival of meditation
practice and an emphasis on active political and social involvement; rampant magical,
syncretic ritual practice and insistence on the purity of the authentic teaching. The modern
period has seen increased lay leadership at various levels of religious life. The YMBAs of
Burma and the Buddhist Sunday schools that have arisen in Thailand have obviously been
influenced by Western Christian models. Coupled with this phenomenon, however, we find a
polar opposition a persistent cult of the holy man to whom supernatural powers are
attributed. While the monk as miracle worker is not a new phenomenon in Theravda Buddhism
it has persisted to the present time and has been on the upswing in the contemporary period.
Meditation has always been the sine qua non of Buddhist practice, but traditionally it was the
preserve of the forest-dwelling (araavs) or meditating(vipassana dhura) monk. In the
modern period, meditation has been more widely practiced as part of the routines of ordinary
763
764
765
766

Faure, Visions of Power. Imagining Medieval Japanese Buddhism, 217.

King, Orientalism and Religion. Postcolonial Theory, India and the Mystic East, 159.
Dumoulin, stliche Meditation und christliche Mystik, 217.
Gombrich and Obeyesekere, Buddhism Transformed. Religious Change in Sri Lanka, 240.

150

Buddhist temples and, more particularly, in meditation centers that either include or are
specifically for lay practice. Some meditating monks have also gained reputations not only for
their method of meditation or for holiness but for the attainment of extraordinary powers as well.
Conventional Thai Buddhist religious practice has stressed merit-making rituals. These are
aimed at obtaining personal benefit and propitiating various supernatural powers for protection
or good luck. The goal of Buddhist worldly householder is to improve ones life materially
through the mechanism of gaining merit or improving ones karmic status. 767 This Buddhist
mechanism of gaining merit could be re-read in the light of surrogate victim mechanism.

7. Specialists of the Sacred and Violent Undifferentiation

7.1. World-renouncer as Specialists of the Sacred
World-renouncer represents that very reversal of values which we expected to find in
festivals.768 The liminal world-renouncer represents the violent sacred as a profession (see IV.
The Sacred as a Profession).769He represents festive transgression and indifferentiation. Girard
emphasizes the loss of distinctions that accompanies the merging of individual and group in
festivity. Other than antimimetic prohibitions, all ritual reenacts a sacrificial crisis, that is to say
the enactment of the mimetic crisis. Crisis of difference is not enacted for its own sake. Its
purpose is to provoke the sacrificial resolution. A mimetic paroxysm of disorder is necessary if
the resolution is to occur. Rituals and prohibitions can be seen as directed toward the same end,
which is the renewed order and peace that emerge from the victimage mechanism. The
prohibition and the ritual attempt in different ways to ensure that peace.770
For Girard, myth and ritual are the mimetic re-enactments of an originary act of spontaneous
and arbitrary murder, rationalized as a necessary act of differentiation. The fundamental purpose
of the festival is to set the stage for a sacrificial act that marks at once and the climax and the
termination of the festivities. With Roger Caillois, Girard has pointed out the sacrificial origin
of festivals. If the crisis brought on by the loss of distinctions and the subsequent advent of
reciprocal violence can be celebrated in such a jubilant fashion, it is because these holocausts
are seen in retrospect as the initial stages of a cathartic process. The violent dismissal of
767

Donald K. Swearer, Buddism in Southeast Asia, in Buddhism and Asian History. Religion, History, and Culture.
Readings from the Encyclopedia of Religion (Mircea Eliade, Editor in Chief), ed. Joseph M. Kitagawa and Mark D.
Cummings. New York and London, 1987, 125-7.
768
Louis Dumont, Religion/Politics and History in India. Collected Papers in Indian Sociology (Paris/The Hague:
Mouton Publihsers, 1970), 51.
769
Van der Veer, Gods on Earth: Religious Experience and Identity in Ayodhya.
770
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 29.

151

distinctions now acquires a favorable connotation, which will eventually manifests itself as a
festive display. The festival revitalizes the cultural order by reenacting its conception,
reproducing an experience that is viewed as the source of health and abundance. Festivals are
based on the assumption that there is a direct link between the sacrificial crisis and its resolution.
The crisis is inseparable from its happy ending and becomes itself a cause for jubilation.771
The civilizational paradox of Buddhist culture based on the festive, Dionysian and
undifferentiating institution of world-renunciation can be explained in terms of Girard's theory
of the sacrificial origins of human culture. The festive institution of world-renunciation and its
specialist of the violent sacred, world-renouncer seem to represent this crisis of Dionysian
indifferentiation and festive reversal of values. Girards mimetic theory offers an illuminating
reading of violent sacred around festive and Dionysian world-renunciation. Mimetic crisis is
seen as a crisis of indifferentiation where each character looses his identity and becomes the
mirror image of the other. Girard explains in his The Plague in Literature and Myth that the
plague is always accompanied by the thematic cluster of indifferentiation, social upheaval,
mimetic doubling, and sacrifice. In plague-infested societies, civic disorder is always either real
or feared, for just as disease dissolves bodily tissues and organs, it similarly levels honor and
degree among men.772
The plage, Girard contends, becomes the agent of undifferentiation and mimetic doubling:
When the difference goes, the relationship becomes violent and sterile as it becomes more
symmetrical, as everything becomes more perfectly identical.773 Sophocless Oedipus Rex,
Shakespeares Troilus and Cressida and Romeo and Juliet exemplify these thematic elements,
including sacrifice the societal urge to purge disease and reestablish order by driving off a
scapegoat, one symbolically identified with the source of the disease.
World-renouncer with his yogic meditation as inner sacrifice seems to represent this
undifferentiation and the monstrous dissolution of all differences. World-renouncers yogic and
initiatory meditation seems to specialize and represent festive indifferentiation. Worldrenouncing ritual meditation means the most radical experience of death and dissolution
(laya) of his old, outward identity, which is the core of initiation. This is achieved through ritual
meditation, by visualizing the power (akti) of the great Goddess as a ranging fire, which blazes
up within the initiate and consumes his entire body. As the fire of the Goddess rises upward
through the yogic adept, it progressively dissolves each of the 36 elements (tattvas) which
comprise all existing things. If the Tantric initiation dissolves the ordinary body and identity
of world-renouncer, the more advanced Tantric practices, as Urban points out, aim to dissolve
albeit temporarily and within the confines of ritual all ordinary social boundaries. As Louis
Dumont has shown, the orthodox Hindu religious and social order is based largely on a complex
771

Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 128-9.

Ren Girard, The Plague in Literature and Myth, in To Double Business Bound: Essays on Literature,
Mimesis, and Anthropology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 126-7.
773
Ibid., 142.
772

152

classification and hierarchical structuring of the world and society: all things may be
categorized according to a hierarchy of relative purity and impurity, with Brahmins at the top
and Untouchables at the bottom. The aim of Tantric ritual, however, is nothing other than to
manipulate precisely those substances which are considered most impure and polluting in the
eyes of orthodox Hindu society.774

7. 2.

Yogic Process as Process of Violent Undifferentiation

Yogic processes could be described as a process of violent undifferentiation, dissolution,

merging of world (macrocosm) within the world-renouncing yogis own body as a microcosm.
The classical characterization of yoga is that at the beginning of Patajalis Yogatra
S (I, 2),
where yoga is defined as the suspension of the cognitive functions of the mind (yoga
citavttinirodhah). Two disciplines which are characteristically Tantric, and which are indeed
always present in Tantra yoga, are meditation on mystical syllables (Mantra yoga) and a scheme
of meditation, known as Laya yoga or Kualin yoga, which concerns an elaborate mystical
physiology. Laya means dissolution, and refers to the dissolution of the everyday world
(macrocosm) within the Tantrics own body seen as a microcosm and ultimately the dissolution
of his empirical self into the deity. In the final stage of Laya Yoga, the whole of the yogins
differentiated existence is totally submerged in the undifferentiated. Pta
jala Yoga terms
immediate samdhi as undifferentiated merger (asapajta samdhi).775
Yogic process seems to represent festive reversal of values and indifferentiation. As Girard
has argued, the imaginary crimes of the scapegoat can be idenfified in sacred monarchy. In
most cases, the system offers a quite significant combination of the crimes attributed to both Job
and Oedipus. The sacred king is expected to confess officially to a certain number of oedipal
crimes: the murder of a father or a close relative, or some well-concocted incestuous
relationship with a mother or sister.776 This oedipal crimes of indifferentiation could be found
also in the transgressive crimes of tantric and yogic world-renouncers in his initiation. Many
tntrikas, openly indulging in cross-caste adultery, coprophagy, and all manner of other
(transgressive) purity violations and antisocial behavior (or at least openly claiming to do so),
were simply revolting to the general public.777
Girards insights may help to explain this yogic process and the yogins commingled

774

Hugh B. Urban, Elitism and Esotericism: Strategies of Secrecy and Power in South Indian Tantra and French
Freemasonry, in Numen: International Review for the History of Religions. Vol. 44 (1997), 18.
775
Sanjukta Gupta, Modes of Worship and Meditation, in Sanjukta Gupta, Dirk Jan Hoens, Teun Goudriaan (ed.),
Hindu Tantrism,(Leiden: Brill 1979), 163-4.
776
Girard, Job, the Victim of His People, 88.
777
David Gordon White, The Alchemical Body. Siddha Traditions in Medieval India (Chicago and London: The
Universities of Chicago Press, 1996), 7.

153

male and female essences778 in the sense of violent indifferentiation. As reconciliatory victims
and cultural heroes, world-renouncers are fighting for power, for a sociopolitical power that is
the macrocosmic homologue of the power the tantric practitioner gains over his bodily
microcosm, and by extension over the entire universe, through his violent(the haha in haha
yoga) antinomian practice. 779 The reintegration of the male and female halves of the
universe, in Girards terminology violent indifferentiation, can be accomplished through actual
sexual yoga or maithuna, which obliterates the illusory duality of the material world by an
actual union of opposites male and female, high and low caste, pure and impure in secret
ritual. The most important means for this radical return to unity is the yogic technique known
as Laya yoga (the process of dissolution) or Kualin yoga, the arousal of the inner
spiritual energy of the body through sexual intercourse.780
In all classes of Buddhist Tantras the most important thing is the stress on this union of
Praj and Upya, either in the philosophical sense or the esoteric yogic sense. The
commingling of this Praj and Upya like the mixture of water and milk in a state of nonduality is called the prajo-pya. In the Sdhana-ml we find that Heruka, as embraced by his
Praj, represents the knowledge of the non-dual union.781 Buddhist logic of non-dual,
undifferentiating and transgressive union is represented by the wrathful, violent and Dionysian
Buddhas (couples). Buddhist non-duality represents the Dionysian logic of violent
undifferentiation specialized by the world-renouncing Buddhas as victim in Girardian sense.
Some of the traits of iva were incorporated into Buddhist symbolism, most notably in the
iconography of Heruka Buddhas like Cakrasavara and Hevajra. There are fierce, or wrathful,
Buddhas and other deities in Tantric iconography. The wrathful deities (krodhakya),
sometimes known as Herukas, or blood-drinkers, generally have bloodshot eyes, an angry
glare, dark blue skin, a tiger-skin garment belted with a snake, and jewelry made of bones and
skulls. The wrathful category includes male Buddhas, like hevajra, and female Buddhas, like the
lion-faced Sihamukh.782
Heruka Buddhas is one of the most popular deities of the Buddhist pantheon whose worship
is described in the Herukatantra. 783 These violent, undifferentiated and monstrous double
(Heruka Buddhas) symbolizes the Buddha-realization and the process of enlightenment
(Buddha-werdung, der Vorgang der Erleuchtung). 784 Thus Buddhist yogic process of
meditative Buddha-realization can be read in the sense of initiatory process of violent
778

Ibid., 202.
Ibid., 347-8.
780
Urban, Elitism and Esotericism: Strategies of Secrecy and Power in South Indian Tantra and French
Freemasonry, 22.
781
Dasgupta, An Introduction to Tntric Buddhism, 92-3, 117.
782
Miranda Shaw, Passionate Enlightenment. Women in Tantric Buddhism (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1994), 28, 32.
783
N. N. Bhattacharyya, Buddhism in the History of Indian Ideas, Manohar 1993, p. 288.
784
Herrmann-Pfandt, Dknis. Zur Stellung und Symbolik des Weiblichen im Tantrischen Buddhismus, 126.
779

154

undifferentiation (indiffrenciation violente ). As in the Greek tragedy and primitive religion,

according to Girard, it is not the differences but the loss of them that gives rise to violence and
chaos. The metaphor of the floodtide that transforms the earths surface to a muddy mass is
frequently employed by Shakespeare to designate the undifferentiated state of the world that
is also portrayed in Genesis and that Girard has attributed to the sacrificial crisis.785 Not only in
the realms of Greek tragedy or Shakespearean drama, but also in the sexually and
cosmologically undifferentiated body of world-renouncing yogi, we can read the Girardian
theme of violent undifferentiation.
World-renouncing and yogic process of coincidentia oppositorum could be considered as a
process of violent indifferentiation. It is, says Girard, not necessary, with Lvi-Strauss, that
ritual is a deliberate refusal of thought and language. There can be no question of returning to
mystical formulations or their philosophical counterparts, such as the coincidentia
oppositorum, the magical power of the negative, and the value of the Dionysian.786 Girards
theory on violent indifferentiation offers a revealing look at the Dionysian in this yogic process
of dissolving and melting.
Like wax that has been melted, the mind and body of the yogin has been melted by
dedicated yogic practice. This theme of the melting or dissolving of the world into the
unitary consciousness is widespread in aiva mysticism. Nonduality is the Dionysian state of
forest world-renouncer (the Nonduality of iva). Sacred world-renouncer as founding victim
represents the (violently undifferentiating) nonduality. The nonduality of the ultimate
consciousness of iva is understood to be continuous with, contiguous, and subjacent to the
differentiated play of the world. It is the source of all differentation (si), it is that which
underlies, supports, and inheres in the variety of differentiation (sthiti), and it is that into which
the differentation finally merges.As a result, for that yogin, the very distinction between
inward and outwarldly turned perception and, indeed, between self and other, between the
supposedly only silent and tranquil absolute consciousness and the apparently only dynamic and
active relative world all of these distinctions collapse. In the yoga of aivism, central to
such a practice was the forms of samvea or absorptive meditative merging, of which there
are several varieties or degrees of intensity.787 Buddhist nondual logic is world-renouncers
logic: The Bodhisattvas so-called nondual knowledge is described in the paradoxical wordplay.788 Sacred world-renouncer representing the Dionysian nonduality, melting of differences
and violent undifferentiation becomes the source of all differentiation. World-renouncer as
785

Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 52.

Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 63.
787
Paul E. Muller Ortega, On the Seal of ambhu: A Poem by Abhinavagupta, in David Gordon White (ed),
Tantra in Practice. Princeton Reading in Religions (Princeton-Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000), 576, 580,
582.
788
Luis O. Gmez, From the Extraordinary to the Ordinary: Images of the Bodhisattva in East Asia, in Donald S.
Lopez, Jr. Steven C. Rockefeller(ed), The Christ and the Bodhisattva (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1987), 156.
786

155

victim becomes the matrix of differences.

Tapas (yogic fire) also represents the violent undifferentiation or melting down of
differences. In aiva cosmology, tapas begins from within, from the interior of being, melting
down its internal divisions. Tapas is melting down differences into the soft, undifferentiated
flow of a liquid togetherness. Fire for that matter, heat in general- is a dense but fluid
destroyer of categories, of boundaries that define categories of being. Internal sacrificial fire
(tapas) symbolizes the violent undifferentiating and melting down of differences. Internal tapas
fire heats, cooks, melts,dissolves all that is hard, stony, external. We are dealing with
the melting down of fixed structures and congealed boundaries, we could describe the process
as partly analogous to the violent attack on externalities that is so often described in the myths.
Heated innerness thus has several consistent features. It is active, dynamic, and fluid;
dissolving borders.789
Mimetic theory provies a promising framework for (re-)reading world-renouncing and
yogic nonduality in terms of violent indifferentiation. In a tantric metaphysics that stresses
unity-in-difference (bhedbheda), or nonduality-in-duality (avaitdvaita), there has as well to
be a stress on equipose, equivalence, and equanimity, on the union or coincidence of polar
opposities. In practical terms, the factoring of the two into the one has been perennially enacted,
in tantra, through sexual union between practitioner and consort. However, every subtle body is
intrinsically androgynous, being divided along the vertical axis between male and female
halves after the fashion of Ardhanrvara, the half-female form of iva,790 which means, in
Girardian terminology, sexual indifferentiation and the undifferentiated symmetries in the
relationship between doubles. Thus, Buddhist Dionysian logic of nonduality could be grasped
by the Girardian notion of undifferentiated that certainly corresponds to part of what goes on
in rituals all over the world: promiscuous sexual encounters, the overturning of hierarchies, the
supposed metamorphosis of the participants into each other or into monstrous beings, etc.791 In
order truly to deconstruct Buddhist metaphysics of nonduality and nothingness, one must deal
with the violent sacred represented by the world-renouncer. Paradoxical and nonsensical logic
of nonduality has to be thought of as representing the conflictual madness, the cultural
undifferentiation that constitues the initial phase of many rituals, the preparation for
sacrifice. 792
Most of the messy parts of tantric practices were cleaned up, aestheticised, and
internalized in different ways. For the later high tantric schools, the cult of the yogins and
the ritual production, offering, and consumption of sexual fluids were continued, but only within
the restricted context of the secret practice of an inner circle of initiates. In certain cases, all
789

Don Handelman and David Shulman, God Inside Out. ivas Game of Dice (New York/Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1997), 51, 90-1, 162.
790
White, The Alchemical Body. Siddha Traditions in Medieval India, 252.
791
Girard, To Double Business Bound: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology, 155.
792
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 28.

156

such transactions involving sexual fluids became wholly internalized and incorporated into
the so-called subtle body (skma arra ). Here, all humans were viewed as essentially
androgynous with sexual intercourse an affiar between a female serpentine nexus of engery,
generally called the kualin, and a male principle, identified with iva, both of which were
located within the subtle body.793
Girards thesis of the founding victim completely deconstructs the sacredness of violence,
together with all its philosophical and psychoanalytic substitutes.794 Girards theory may help
us to trace the violent origins of the Buddhist philosophy and logic of nonduality represented by
the sacred world-renouncer. Not only Buddhist philosophy but also western thought continues to
function as the effacement of traces of founding murder and violence. There is a similarity in
structure between Derrida's deconstruction of logocentric texts and Girard's deconstruction of
human culture. Derridas primary concern is the philosophical exclusion of writing. He talks a
great deal about violence in texts, but seems to get beyond textuality and beyond theorizing
about texts and language. Violent sacred around Buddhist world-renouncer can be decoded
using Girardian theory. The world-renouncing victim undifferentiates and then redifferentiates
world order: The victim occupies the place -- within and without the community -- in Girard's
view of cultural origins that writing occupies in Derrida's critique of origins or of original
presence, of which language is but the representation and writing the secondary representation,
the forlorn and occluded trace. The victim, like writing, is a supplement of a supplement
(speech), a stand-in, an arbitrary substitute for any and all members of a community that does
not exist prior to the victim's expulsion.795
The shkta cults that survived the centuries increasingly emphasized the right-handed
way- publicly at least- which represents a sublimation of the original practice. The rituals,
inner processes, supernatural relations and so on were still expressed in explicit sexual terms,
but these were interpreted as metaphors, and as such have left their traces in rites of worship,
metaphysical terminology, mythological imagery and hatha-yoga physiology. 796 Using
Girards theory that bears some similarity with structuralism, we can turn to Buddhist texts in
order to identify and decode the sacrificial logic as a kind of deep structure. Tantric scholarpractitioners, both Asian and Western, who, in an attempt to rehabilitate the dark image of
Tantra, have emphasized the refined (right-handed) philosophical speculation that grew out of
preexisting (left-handed) Tantric practices some of which were of a sexual or
transgressive nature while generally denying the foundational importance of transgressivity
or sexuality to the traditions themselves. No form of medieval Hinduism, Buddhism, or
Jainism has been without a Tantric component. In Japan, all of the eight schools of Buddhism
have a Tantric pedigree, although Shington and Tendai have been Japans most successful
793
794
795
796

White, The Alchemical Body. Siddha Traditions in Medieval India, 4-5.

Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 443.
McKenna, Violence and Difference. Girard, Derrida, and Deconstruction, 16.
Hartsuiker, Sdhus : Holy Men of India, 28.

157

exponents of Pure Buddhist Eostericism. Finally, the constitutional monarchies of Nepal and
Bhutan are the worlds sole surviving Tantric kingdoms; their state ceremonial comprise
Hindu Tantric liturgies and rituals, and nearly all of their deities are Tantric.797
Greek tragedies, as interpreted by Girard, tend to reveal the founding violence and witness
themes such as incest, parricide, matricide, warring twins, and a preference for formal
symmetry, whether on the level of plot, structure, or language. Enemy brothers, who are
virtually indistinguishable from one another represents the process of reciprocal violence,
confronting the symmetrical patterns of the sacrificial crisis.798 The monster is the form of the
unformed, of the undifferentiated, of violent doubles, whose social form, as Girard has shown,
is unanimous violence. One of the interesting points in Girards theory is that it shows us how,
out of these undifferentiated states, differentiated states may arise. In this sense we can
illuminate the violent paradox of world-constructing or (re-)differentiating world-renunciation
(a sacred undifferentiated institution) with the help of mimetic theory on transition from an
undifferentiated to a differentiated state through the scapegoat mechanism.

7.3. La Pense Sauvage, Buddhism and Lvi-Strauss

In Chapter 4 Doubles and the Pharmakos: Lvi-Strauss, Frye, Derida, and Shakespeare,
Girard maintains that structuralism can only collect differences. In order to vindicate the claim
that it lays bare the true mechanisms of myth, it is necessary to show that differentiation is the
whole of myth. If differentiation must be viewed as process, however, it cannot completely
ignore the undifferentiated, at least as a starting point. According to Girard, Lvi-Strauss takes
this necessity into account; the undifferentiated is present in his analayses but as precisely that
and nothing more, as a mere starting point which is never questioned for its own sake. In
primitive religions taken as a whole, however, the undifferentiated looms too large to be entirely
disregarded. The undifferentiated belongs to ritual and ritual to the undifferentiated. Girard
argues that in both myth and ritual we have first the undifferentiated, then differentiation.
Shakespeare are also obsessed, in Girards view, with chaos, with the destruction of
institutions, and hierarchies, the reversal and obliteration of even sexual identities, with
countless phenomena which amount, in other words, to a dissolving of differences. In
Shakespeare, as in the Greeks, the undifferentiated is closely associated with conflict.799
Girard is writing in the wake of Claude Lvi-Strauss adaptation of de Saussures linguistic
structuralism to the anthropological study of societies. For Lvi-Strauss, social order is
797

David Gordon White, Introduction. Tantra In Practice: Mapping a Tradition, in David Gordon White (ed),
Tantra in Practice. Princeton Reading in Religions (Princeton-Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000), 4-9.
798
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 223-4.
799
Girard, Oedipus Unbound: Selected Writings on Rivalry and Desire, 95-7.

158

structured by differences. Girard concentrates his criticism on the structuralists linguistic

doctrine of difference. He sees this doctrine, in the work of Lvi-Strauss, as being inflacted into
an absolute principle. The structuralist attachment to such a principle leads Levi-Strauss to
elevate myth (based on difference) and to reject ritual (based on undifferentiated immediacy).
The most basic of such undifferentiating rituals is the reconciliatory victim. Scapegoat is the
most basic of symbols and the very source of our symbolizing power. Undifferentiating and then
redifferentiating role of sacred Buddhist world-renouncers could be read in this light of
Girardian sacrificial mechanism. Ascetics use violence on their own bodies to acquire power
over the microcosm of the body power in society.800
The Dionysian indifferentiation of yogic process could be understood as sacrificial. Of vital
importance to the yogic tradition is the fact that the sacrificial fires in question are gathered
together within ones body. There, they serve both as a cremation pyre by which the nowobsolete mundane, social body is shown to have died to the world and, in the
postcrematory existence of the sannysin (the renouncer), as the seat of sacrifice, which
has now been internalized. It is here, in the inner fires of tapas, which fuel the offerings of ones
vital breaths in the inner sacrifice known as the prgnihotra, that the practice of yoga very
likely had its theoretical origins. Passing through a state of death to bodily immortality is
most especially effected through the meditation of fire here, the inner fire in which the
world-renouncer has immolated his mundane body once he has laid together his sacrificial
fires.801
In his essay Differentiation and Undifferentiation in Lvi-Strauss and Current Critical
Theory, Girard criticizes Claude Lvi-Strauss who asserts that myth embodies a principle of
differentiation identical with language and thought and ritual, on the other hand, tries to retrieve
an undifferentiated immediacy. Unlike immediacy, the notion of undifferentiated, as Girard
argues, corresponds to part of what goes on rituals all over the world: promiscuous sexual
encounters, the overturning of hierarchies, the supposed metamorphosis of the participants into
each other or into monstrous beings, etc. Girard dont agree that rituals are committed to this
undifferentiated once and for all. All great traditional interpretations, notably the Hindu and
the Chinese, attribute to ritual the end which Lvi-Strauss would reserve to myth alone:
differentiation.802
Buddhist logic of nonduality can be grasped by this ritual logic of the undifferentiated.
Girardian notion of undifferentiated corresponds to Buddhist world-renouncers specifically
ritual and initiatory logic of nonduality for or before the (re-)differentiation of Buddhist
enlightenment. Girards theory on Differentiation and Undifferentiation also may help to
800

Van der Veer, Gods on Earth: Religious Experience and Identity in Ayodhya, 133 ; White, The Alchemical Body.
Siddha Traditions in Medieval India, 348, n.36.
801
Ibid., 281-2.
802
Ren Girard, Differentiation and Undifferentiation in Lvi-Strauss and Current Critical Theory, in
Contemporary Literature Vol. 17, NO. 3 (1976).

159

explain

tantric

strategies

of

egalitarianism and

re-hierarchialization.

803

Tantric

egalitarianism, namely undifferentiation is not committed to this undifferentiated immediacy

once and for all, but to (re-)differentiation. Tantra has played political role as a fundamental
ideology supporting kingship and royal hierarchies in Tibet, Nepal, China, and India.804 Until
recent times, Tantric ritual constituted a bulwark for the state in the Indianized and Sanskritized
monarchies of Asia, from Nepal to Bali. It has been pointed out this intimate relationship
between various types of Tantric specialists, their royal clients, and the protection of the state
throughout Asia, including Tang China, Heian Japan, Malla Nepal and Kalacuri central India.805
World-renouncer as founding victim plays the differentiating role for the Buddhist world
order. For Girard, the end result of ritual undifferentiation is the regeneration of differences. The
undifferentiated presents itself as preliminary to (re)differentiation and often as its prerequisite.
The original chaos of the Greeks are all examples of mythical undifferentiation. Since the
process is one of pure differentiation, the only appropriate mirror is the undifferentiated. For
Girard, it is not reasonable to describe the incentive for plunging a postulant into the
undifferentiating waters of baptism as a nostagia for the immediate. He will drop only
symbolically in order to reach the shore of a new differentiation.806Buddhist undifferentiated
logic of nonduality represented by the wild and forest world-renouncer has to be thought of as
preliminary to (re)differentiation. Rude awakening of wild Buddhist world-renouncer is
simulated in order to reach the Buddhist shore of a new differentiation.
Thus in spite of superficial similarities between philosophical deconstruction in the French
sense and Buddhist yogic world-renouncers initiatory process of experiential deconstruction
in certain Buddhist and Hindu non-dual philosophies. A hermeneutical-phenomenological
strategy was, for Davis, employed that reads Advaita and Zen teacher-student exchanges as a
dialectic between the two levels of reality or the two truths that are a philosophical mainstay of
each tradition. The absolute non-dual standpoint (pramrthika) of the teacher and the relative
dualistic standpoint of the pupil (vyavahra) are shown to be a shifting dynamic in which the
student is pushed to different levels of understanding until finally the idea of levels or
understandings dissolves. Girards mimetic theory into the ritual process of violent
undifferentiation provides a better understanding of this Buddhist meditativ-yogic process of
undifferentiating dissolving. A standard Indian philosophical formula, found in both Buddhist
and Advaita dialogues the four-cornered negation or tetralemma was identified as a
deconstructive rubric that is employed to shift the practitioner into a non-dual experiential
space in which seemingly contradictory assertions can coexist in the practitioners awareness
without apparent contradicition. Non-dual characteristics of meditative awareness should be re803

Urban, Elitism and Esotericism: Strategies of Secrecy and Power in South Indian Tantra and French
Freemasonry, 4.
804
Urban, Tantra. Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion, 274.
805
White, Introduction. Tantra In Practice: Mapping a Tradition, 31-2.
806
Girard, Oedipus Unbound: Selected Writings on Rivalry and Desire, 156-7.

160

read as a initiatory process of violent undifferentiation. In Zen, one of the key non-two
pairings, for Davis, is the negation of difference between sasra (relative, conditioned
reality) and nirva (absolute unconditioned Reality). This negation of difference is to be
interpreted as violent undfiferentiation in Girardian sense rather than deconstruction.807
In fact, a radically anthropological close reading seems to indicate that this Buddhist
allegedly deconstructive logic of undifferentiating nonduality and emptiness can be understood
as a kind of la pense sauvage referring to forest, undomesticated and 'untamed' worldrenouncing thought of Buddhas in his tragic existence of tropical wildness. At the end of Tristes
Tropiques Lvi-Strauss proposes Buddhism as an alternative to the model of knowledge as
destruction of the other. As offering an enlightenment into the false divisions between self and
other, Buddhism was said to be a return to the maternal breast (p. 498). Placing Lvi-Strauss
interest in Eastern religion in a broad twentieth century context, Strenski examines LviStrausss comments on the subject of Buddhist paralles in the thought of Lvi-Strauss. LviStrauss, for Strenski, represents only one example of a leading intellectual whose thought may
meaningfully be said to move in Buddhist directions. The affinity of Lvi-Strauss for
Buddhism can be founded. Virtually any part of Levi-Strausss pessimism, detachment and
introversion can be found in the Buddhist tradition as well. Both structuralism and (at least)
early Buddhism, for Strenski, share relational ontologies.Budhism and structuralism also are
said to reject certain fundamental metaphysical positions. Both reject substantialist
ontologies. Both are said to dismiss the idea of an ultimate meaning in history.808
Lvi-Strausss most important comments on Buddhism are to be found in Tristes Tropiques,
where Lvi-Strauss described his own experience of Buddhist culture in Burma in the early
1950s.809 But his praise of Buddhism is certainly not limited to these passages. In his later
interviews and articles he began opposing Buddhism to the destructive humanism of Western
culture. As Pace has rightly pointed out, Lvi-Strauss has remained locked up in a world of
abstract structures and mental schemas, in which the needs and desires, fears and horrors of
human experience civilized and primitive /- had no place. This is nowhere more obvious
than in Lvi-Strausss ruminations on Buddhism. For him, Buddhism is an intellectual
system, a means of explaining our experience without resorting to unnessary metaphysical
assumptions.810
According to Faure, Derrida addresses to the way in which Lvi-Strauss, in Triestes
Tropiques, romantically elaborates on the binary opposition between speech and writing. In so
doing, Derrida argues, Lvi-Strauss makes a scapegoat of writing and fails to see in orality the
807

Leesa S. Davis, Advaita Vednta and Zen Buddhism: Deconstructive Modes of Spiritual Inquiry, Continuum
International Publishing Group, 2010, xv-7.
808
Ivan Strenski, Religion in Relation. Method, Application and Moral Location (Columbia: University of South
Carolina Press, 1993), 110-13.
809
See Claude Lvi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (Paris: Plon, 1955), 470-7.
810
David Pace, Claude Lvi-Strauss. The Bearer of Ashes, Routledge, 1983, p. 204.

161

very same chacteristics that he condemns in writing.811 When Lvi-Strauss reflects on the
character of the whole, structured world invoked by him, his language of re-presentation,
according to Taylor, is articulated from what he takes to be a Buddhist point of view. As LviStrauss reflects on the character of his invoked, retotalized whole, the rudimentary limitlanguage of atonement/redemption and self-denial becomes a Buddhist limit-lanuage of loss
of subject in a vanishing whole a loss (leffacement)

that Lvi-Strauss takes to be a

methodological necessity for the structural anthropologist. This loss of subject that LviStrauss describes most clearly in the final pages of LHomme nu was anticipated in Tristes
Tropiques when he proclaimed that between Buddhism and himself there could be little
misunderstanding.812
According to Taylor, Buddhist teaching re-presents for Lvi-Strauss what was earlier
summarized as the culmination of his horizontal hermeneutic: the triumph of nonbeing over
being, and the inevitable disappearance of humanity from the impassive face of the earth.
Anthropology might thus be renamed entropology. All the journeying through volumes of
myths structural oppositions and transformations, in order to construct the transcending whole
world of reciprocity, is like so many steps on the way to an enlightenment: the realization of the
provisionality of collective and especially individual being and the ultimate realization of the
absence of meaning. 813
Levi-Strauss states that Buddhism is a radical criticism of life, and leads the sage to
deny all meaning to beings and things, and abolishes the universe, and abolishes itself as a
religion.814 But this sacrificial abolishment of the universe and a radical criticism of life
represent the world-renouncing Buddhist sages dharma and logic who deny all meaning to
beings and things. In my view, Lvi-Strauss does not know the strong sacrificial roots of this
Buddhist forest and tropical logic of violently undifferentiating nothingess and emptiness
represented by world-renouncing tragic heroes (Buddhas). If fire and cooked food are symbols
of culture and raw food of nature, as Lvi-Strauss has suggested, then the world-renouncer in
relinquishing fire has, in a sense, relinquished culture.815
The liminal world-renouncer can be said to be a kind of LHomme nu. The sacrificial
mechanism around these Buddhist world-renouncing tragic heroes who come from tropical
forest in India must be deconstructed. Lvi-Strausss cultural relativity with respect to the
morality of cannibalism is an istance of his principled unwillingness to engage the moral
issues. Structuralism is a branch of the general theory of signs semiotics. Lvi-Strausss
811

Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights. An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition, 234-5 ; See Jacques
Derrida. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1974), 101-140.
812
Lvi-Strauss, Tristes Tropique (eng.ed.), 413, n. 64.
813
Mark Kline Taylor, Beyond Explanation. Religious Dimensions in Cultural Anthropology (Macon: Mercer
University Press, 1986), 243-4.
814
Claude Levi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques, trans. John and Doreen Weightman (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973), 408.
815
Flood, An Introduction to Hinduism, 63.

162

romantic understanding of Buddhism could be undestood against the background of popular

intellectual awareness of Buddhism in Levi-Strausss time especially the period of the 1920s
when he would have come into contact with these and other diverse intellectual influences as a
student of philosophy in Paris. This type of Buddhism was a salon Buddhism. Evidence of a
common understanding of a vague sort of Buddhism is evident in German intellectual and
popular circles of the time in question, for example Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann, Karl
Jaspers, Oswald Spengler among others. For Strenski, surely there are French parallels, those
thinkers who might have popularized Buddhist notions among the French intelligentsia during
the formative period of Levi-Strausss intellectual life in the 1920s. At any rate, scholars might
want to look here for evidence of such sources of Buddhist ideas in Levi-Strauss.816
Buddhist (world-renouncers) lanuage of loss of subject seems to mystify the founding
mechanism and violence. This world-renouncing lanuage of loss of subject and nonduality
have to be comprehended within the initiatory context of world-renouncers yogic meditation.
In all rites de passage, for Girard, the temporary loss of identity, or whatever ordeal the
postulant may undergo, fits very well the undifferentiated conception of Levi-Strauss but only
in a first phase which, rather than being an end in itself, is a means, paradoxical no doubt but
constantly reasserted, toward the ultimate goal of ritual. This goal is obviously
(re)differentiation since it consists in a new and stable status, a well-defined identity. The first
phase belongs to the undifferentiated which culminates in the immolation where it turns into its
opposite. The end result is the regeneration of differences. The undifferentiated presents itself
as preliminary to (re)differentiated and often as its prerequisite. The original chaos of the
Greeks and the tohu wa bohu of Genesis, for Girard, are all examples of mythical
undifferentiation.817
Girardian categories of the undifferentiated and differentiation help us understand the
founding paradox of world-constructing/differentiating world-renunciation and world-renouncer
representing the ritual undifferentiated. The undifferentiated represented by tragic worldrenouncer who belongs to the tropical wildness in India belongs to ritual and Buddhist
(initiatory) ritual to the undifferentiated. Buddhist world-renouncers logic of nonduality and
emptiness belong to the undifferentiated. Buddhist world-renouncers choatic logic and locus
of nothingness and nonduality can be considered to be an example of this undifferentiated
preliminary to (re)differentiated. For Girard, since the process is one of pure differentiation, the
only appropriate mirror is the undifferentiated. This mirror is identical with the primordial
stuff of the myths are supposed to carve up. In myth as well as in ritual, this undifferentiated,
Girard argues, can only be a representation. Lvi-Strauss structural principle, Girard asserts,
has nothing to do with a real perception that discovers real objects in the real world. It is a pure
816

Strenski, Religion in Relation. Method, Application and Moral Location, 114-6.

Ren Girard, Differentiation and Undifferentiation in Levi-Strauss and Current Criticial Theory, in Directions
for Criticism. Structuralism and Its Alternatives, edited by Murray Krieger and L. S. Dembo (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1977), 111-2.
817

163

differentiating principle that operates on a pure undifferentiated. 818 A purely formal logical
understanding of Buddhist ritual and initiatory logic of nonduality fails to grasp the social
anthrpological complexities and realties existing in the dialectic between the forest worldrenunciation representing the undifferentiated and differentiated world order.
Buddhist doctrine of no-self conforms to the anti-substantial and processual view of
human personality Lvi-Strauss shares with contemporary physiological psychology, argues
Strenski. There is a kind of abhorrence of individualism in both cases of Lvi-Strauss and the
Buddhists. The key correspondence in the psychological views of Lvi-Strauss and the
Buddhists, for Strenski, is their rejection of the transcendental ego. On the whole, both are said
to adopt a certain anti-anthropocentric attitude. To Lvi-Strauss, this means that the human
sciences will paradoxically seek to dissolve man. Indeed, for Lvi-Strauss the human person
is a part of nature and structural anthropology a budding natural science. He calls the firstperson singular detestable and looks forward with bodhisattva-like vision to the
subordination of the egos claims to the objective will-to-emancipation of that multitude of
human beings who are still denied the means of a choosing their own destiny. But despite some
existing similarities between Buddhism and Lvi-Strausss thought, it must be admitted,
Strenski maintains, that the cognitive powers claimed by the Buddhists were rather special,
and not therefore really comparable to those Lvi-Strauss may have had in dismissing the
cognitive pretensions of introspection.

819

It should be noted that despite some affinities, there is a fundamental difference between
Buddhist (world-renouncers) thought and Lvi-Strausss structural anthropology. Buddhist
doctrine of no-self represents rather special and specific doctrine of yogic world-renouncers and
Bodhisattvas. The sacrificial and volcanic origin of Buddhist (world-renouncers) logic of
nonduality and emptiness could be traced. For Girard, Durkheim suggests the same origin for
primitive religion and for the symbolic thought itself, a volcanic origin that makes reality
appear. Girard believes that Lvi-Strausss specific contribution lies in these two categories of
differentiation and undifferentiation which he has developed but which he cannot fully utilize
because he turns them into metaphysical absolutes.

820

Buddhist logic of nonduality and

emptiness also has often been understood to be a kind of metaphysical absolutes, without
tracing this world-renouncers logic back to the social anthropological dialectics and
relationships between world-renouncer and Buddhist householder.
How could disorder generate order ? Lvi-Strauss himself, Girard says, has often
acknowledged, notably in Anthropologie structurale I, the key role played by some very
ambiguous figures such as the North American trickster upon whom all the contradictions
inherent not only in disorder but in the improbable conjunction of disorder and order appear
to converge and to settle. These figures are highly exalted as mythical heroes, founding
818
819
820

Ibid., 113-7.
Strenski, Religion in Relation. Method, Application and Moral Location, 125-7.
Girard, Differentiation and Undifferentiation in Levi-Strauss and Current Criticial Theory, 120.

164

ancestors, even savior gods, but they may also be debased as cheats, transgressors and criminals.
At the least, there will be something anomalous in them which bespeaks great misfortune as
well as a high destiny.821 Thus Buddhist world-renouncers sacrificial doctrine of no-self and
the violently undifferentiated, paradoxical and ambiguous logic of nonduality should be
understood in the light of the differentiating and founding mechanism of reconcilatory victim.
Buddhist world-renouncers, Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, as noted elsewhere, was a kind of
trickster who appear simultaneously as a renouncer and cultural hero, as both sustaining and
suverting social structure, as making and transgressing boundaries.822
The logical ambiguity and contradiction existing in Buddhist paradoxical logic of nonduality
are related to the liminal and ambiguous world-renouncer upon whom all the contradictions
inherent not only in disorder but in the improbable conjunction of disorder and order appear to
converge and to settle. Thus the paradox of Buddhist nonsensical logic of nonduality opposed to
the commonsensical logic of Buddhist householder should be explicated social
anthropologically, not in purely formal logical terms. The improbable conjunction of worldrenouncer and world-conquerer could be also well explained in this light of founding
mechanism of the surrogate victim.
Girardian two categories of differentiation and undifferentiation can be applied to the social
anthropological dialectics and dynamic of gift exchange between world-renouncer
representing the undifferentiated and worldly householder. Strenski argues that Lvi-Strausss
theory may be applied to the formation of Buddhist society to the domestication of the
sangha. The Buddha always warned against too-close ties between world-renouncing monks
and laity. From the days of Mausss analysis of gift we are at least sensitive to the social
dimension of giving. The Buddhist world-renouncer, bhikkhu, is supposed to be a paradigm of
non-reciprocity. 823 In my view, Girardian hermeneutics of differentiating mechanism of the
surrogate victim seems to provide a better understanding of the generative process of
domestication of forest world-renunciation and of the dynamic of gift exchange. Buddhist
world-renouncer as a paradigm of non-reciprocity and a kind of sacred exception play the role
of the founding victim.
The mimetic crisis can be resolved through a still mimetic but unanimous transfer against
an arbitrary victim. The victim should acquire in retrospect all the features which are ascribed
to the ambiguous mediators of mythology. For Girard, the victim becomes the signifier of all
relations between the members of the community, especially the worst and the best. We can
understand, then, why all religious prescriptions can be referred to that ambiguous mediator
the prohibitions because their purpose is to avoid a recurrence of the crisis which the victim
embodies, the rituals because they are a reenactment of the crisis not for its own sake but for the
sake of the sacrificial resolution. We can understand why a notion such as the sacred with its
omnipotence both for the best and for the worst can develop from such episodes of
victimage. For Girard, the interpretation of both conflictual and harmonious relations, inside
821
822
823

Ibid., 122.
Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy. A Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism, 101-2.
Strenski, Religion in Relation. Method, Application and Moral Location, 144.

165

and outside the community, must focus on the victim. Girard asserts that the religious transfer is
the fundamental fact which each religious community must interpret in its own way within the
structural constraints that stem from the type of collective delusion it cannot fail to be. The
Buddhist civilizational paradox of world-constructing world-renouncer is to be read in terms of
the structuring power of victimage. All religious themes, according to Girard, are brought
back to a single structural delusion which necessarily transfigures or eliminates its own
generative mechanism. The victim appears to embody the violence of the crisis, interpreted as
a bad and disruptive sacrum but metamorphosed by the expulsion into something still
dangerous but beneficial and constructive, provided it is used in the right place, at the right time
and in precisely measured quantities. Only priests or initiates can practice this delicate
operation. 824 The violently sacred and forest world-renouncer as the differentiating victim
appears to embody the Dionysian undifferentiated and the reversal of values during the
festivals as the specialists of the sacred (Dumont).

7.4. Transgression of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas

From the outset the Buddhist tradition, as Faure825describes it, has been divided between the
most uncompromising moral rigorism and a subversion of all ideals in the name of a higher
truth, transcending good and evil.

The Chan school, in particular, was held captive in this

double bind, in which monks had to adhere strictly to the rule while being confronted with the
higher model of transgression. 826 Becoming a world-renouncing monk is already a
transgression of social order.827 Faure spoke of a double transgression for the Tantric monk,
who transgressed the rules of society by leaving home, and further transgressed the moral
precepts in the name of a higher, antinomian ideal.828
Some Buddhist story seems to assert the superiority of transgression, its status as proof of
awakening. The concept of pivoting or overturning (Skt. Paravrtti), as Rolf Stein remarks,
seems to lie behind the view that rather than negating passion, desire, and sexuality, one can
transmute them. This revulsion is indeed what allows the bodhisattva, in various Buddhist
scriptures, to indulge in sex without being defiled by it. Buddhist morality must therefore be
transcended or rather, transgressed, that is to say, both violated and preserved as law.829
The conflicting interpretations of the motto The passions are awakening (J. bonn soku
bodai) and their practical consequences, observance or transgression of the Buddhist precepts
824
825
826
827
828
829

Girard, Differentiation and Undifferentiation in Levi-Strauss and Current Criticial Theory, 122-6.
Faure, The Red Thread. Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality, 4.
Ibid., 139.
Ibid., 141.
Ibid., 132-3.
Ibid., 4-5.

166

 were the source of a recurring problem in Mahyna. The superiority of transgression as a

proof (and test) of enlightenment found its locus classicus in the Dazhiduluns story of the two
Bodhisattvas Prasannendriya and Agramati. Despite his strict observance of the precepts,
Agramati eventually fell into hell, while Prasannendriya, who advocated the identity of passions
and awakenings, became a Buddha.830
Buddhist transgression, namely ritual transgression of (radical) world-renouncer can be
explained by Girards theory on mechanism of reconciliatory victim. Religious system have
good reason for engaging in transgression. Girards hypothesis on mechanism of reconciliatory
victim explains not only why prohibitions and rituals exist everywhere, but also why all cultures
attribute their foundation to supernatural powers which are also believed to demand respect for
the rules that they transgress, and to sanction their transgression with the most terrible
punishments The transgression of religious prohibitions does in fact increase the risk of
renewing the cycle of mimeitc rivalry and vengeance, as Girard argues.831
We do not understand, so Girard maintains, sacred monarchy because we do not see that the
effectiveness of the founding mechanism structures a misinterpretation of the victim, namely
the unshakable conviction that the victim is guilty, a conviction carried over into the ritual
requirement of incest and other transgressions. Mimetic theory contains illuminating insights
into not only royal enthronement of sacred kingship but also into Buddhist initiation of radical
world-renouncer. The rules of what we call royal enthronment are, according to Girard, those
of sacrifice. They attempt to make the king a victim capable of channelling mimetic antagonism.
One indication of this is that in many societies the inauguration of a king is accompanied by
collective threats against him, and these are required by ritual just as are the expressions of
submission and adoration that follow them. The two attitudes correspond to the transferences of
crisis and of reconciliation that constitute the sacred. The king is at first nothing more than a
victim with a sort of suspended sentence. In reality the victim is passive, but because the
collective transference discharges the community of all responsibility, it creates the illusion of a
supremely active and all-powerful victim.832 Like this, Girard has attempted to show how traces
of founding violence begin to be effaced in an example of sacred kingship.
Faure833 argues that transgression constitutes a determining hagiographical motif in East
Asian Buddhist chronicles. There are, different Buddhist notions of transgression: juridical,
displinary, ritual, oneirical, literary, philosophical, and so on. From the philosophical standpoint,
transgression derives from a position called antinomianism. Buddhist saint in a brothel is a
commonplace theme in Mahyna literature. 834 Many tantric texts contain fairly explicit
references to sexual practices. According to Yixings commentary, the Buddha, the Blessed
830
831
832
833
834

Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy. A Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism, 233.

Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 41-2.
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 51-2.
Faure, The Red Thread. Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality, 98.
Ibid., 108.

167

One (bhagavat), dwelt originally in the bhaga, that is, the sex organ, of the goddess. As Louis
de La Valle Poussin puts it, in the same way as iva organically united with his consort, the
Buddha [Vajrasattva] rests in the mysterious bhaga of the of the Bhagavats.835 Above all,
Tantric ritual involves a systematic transgression of the normal laws of purity in order to
release the dangerous power that lies bound up with impurity and violence.836
In order to avoid making moral judgement of this ritual transgression, one must take into
consideration of initiatory context. An exposition of pledges and vows is also of utmost
importance in Buddhist tantric systems. Immediately after one obtains the characteristic of
initiation, [that initiate] must be made certain [in his mind] about the fundamental and ancillary
transgressions, namely, the fourteen fundamental transgressions (mlpatti), the eight gross
transgressions, and so on. Taking his stand on constant mindfulness and awareness of the
pledges and vows, he jeopardizes his life against the fundamental transgressions, and should he
be defiled by any of the ancillary transgressions.837
Both initiatory transgression of (radical and mythological) Buddhist world-renouncer and
transgression of sacred kings can be properly understood within the context of scapegoat
mechanism. Girard has explained the sexual privileges and transgressions of sacred kings in the
context of victimage mechanism: the monarch suddenly becomes a condemned man who will
die for the sins of the community, a scapegoat in the accepted sense of the term. One can see
in him a kind of priest or supreme initiate whose office demands in principle that he sacrifice
himself voluntarily for the community in practice, however, he sometimes needs a little
persuasion.838
Not only radical and mythological Buddhist world-renouncer, but also future victims
prisoners of war are treated with the kind of double standard accorded the purifying and
sacred scapegoat. They are driven to commit certain transgressions and are then persecuted
and honoured, insulted and esteemed. In Central America, the future victims in certain rituals
have the privilege or obligation to commit certain transgression, sexual or otherwise, during
the interval of time between their selection and immolation Articulating the creative power of
ritual on all levels, Girard argues that the structure of all rituals is identical to that of the
institution we have called sacred kingship.839
According to some sources, one of the eight supernormal powers of the Buddha, as Faure
describes it, is the transmutation of desire or of the sexual act, a transmutation that allows him
to remain in Great Bliss and to avoid any defilement in the midst of the passions. The Tantric
notion of transmutation of desires seems to originate in the Buddhist notion of revulsion,
835

Ibid., 48-9.
Urban, The Path of Power: Impurity, Kingship, and Sacrifice in Assamese Tantra, 777.
837
F.D. Lessing and A. Wayman, tr., Introduction to the Buddhist Tantric Systems (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1998),
329.
838
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 58-9.
839
Ibid., 71-2.
836

168

which was one of the main features of the epistemological Yogcara school. The goal is not to
reject or run away from phenomena, the body, the passions, but to transmute them through such
revulsion or metamorphosis, a kind of simple inversion from a negative sign into a positive one.
This notion, which appears as early as the third century C.E. with Asaga, will be taken up in
China, in particular in the apocryphal ragama-stra, which describes the inversion or
reversal of the impure into the pure.840
Greek tragedy is also interested in reversal as such.841 In Chinese Buddhism, the characters
who resort to simulated madness or eccentricity are often perceived as incarnations of
Bodhisattvas or arhats, the ideal figures of Buddhism.842 The undifferentiating, Dionysian and
festive transmutation (or revulsion, paravtti) represented by the specialists of the festive
reversal of values could be explained from the viewpoint of victimage mechanism. Desires must
be used according to the principle that one nail drives another, poison expels poison. IndoTibetan rituals achieve the transmutation of two fundamental passion, hatred and desire. Hatred
is transmuted by ritual murder, love by ritual coitus. In both forms of ritual, we are told, the aim
is to free human beings, women through love, men through death.843
Girard maintains that the sacred is the sum of human assumptions resulting from collective
transferences focused on a reconciliatory victim. Girards interpretation with its simplicity of
the hypothesis and the endless wealth of applications to be drawn from it, seems to yield
significant explanatory power in illuminating the sacred around Buddhist world-renouncer.
All modern thought is falsified by a mystique of transgression, so maintains Girard.844 Recent
anthropology, Girard goes on to say, has stopped understanding archaic prohibitions because it
does not see that they were directed against violence. Instead, anthropologists have leapt into the
arms of psychoanalysis to say: prohibitions are the results of the complexes of legislators who
are afraid of sex. However, prohibitions are never directed against sexuality in itself, but against
the mimetic rivalries of which sexuality is only the object or provides the opportunity.845
In the Lives of Eminent Monks, one reads about Chinese monks who violate the monastic
code with complete impunity: they drink, eat meat, play, fight, and use vulgar language. Much
more rarely, they transgress the sexual taboo. Generally speaking, not only do these crazy
monks know the limits of transgression, but transgression itself seems to be inscribed within
precise ritual and social contexts. The Buddhist madman is, according to Faure, basically a
hyperbole of the ascetic: whereas the latter rejects the rules of profane life, the crazy monk, in
a typically Mahynist move of double negation, rejects even the rules of monastic life.846

840
841
842
843
844
845
846

Faure, The Red Thread. Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality, 53-4.

Violence and the sacred, 159, goole books.
Faure, The Red Thread. Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality, 105.
Ibid., 48.
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 287.
Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benot Chantre, 61-2.
Faure, The Red Thread. Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality, 101.

169

The social uniqueness the transgressor earned by committing it will insure that the
community's attitude toward this figure (some original banished transgressor, founding father or
mythic hero of the community ) will thereafter be commingled with dread and fascination. This
figure, who has demonstrated an ability to approach the sacred with impunity, will very likely
come to serve as both the mediator and interpreter of the mysteries of the sacred, on the one
hand, and the community's designated victim, on the other. The community's relationship to this
figure will involve the same paradox of attraction and repulsion that characterizes its
relationship to the sacred.
Tantric practice centers around ritualized acts of transgression systematic violations of
social boundaries and taboos. 847 Transgressive discipline is central to the practice of
iconography of Vajrayogin. She is to be visualized within a cremation ground, naked but for
ornaments of bone, and not only sexually empassioned, but streaming with blood; a
provocative juxtaposition given the traditional prescriptions that strictly separate intercourse and
menstruation (e.g., Manu, 4.40-42). Within the context of the ordained Buddhist sangha,
prescriptions for sexual practice were (if possible) even more radical in that they required a
deliberate, yet legitimate, inversion of the celibate monastic code. In this way, transgressive
discipline not only overturns embedded cultural norms, it intentionally challenges the
fundamental ethical and doctrinal tenets of Buddhism.848
In a orgiastic atomosphere in which Tantric practices were carried out, the bizarre
substances specified for use in Tantric ritual (including excrement and urine, blood and semen,
as well as the spiced food and kingly rice), and the ritual prescritipions for gaining power
over others, killing and causing destruction magically, and the like. Perhaps most striking are
the injunctions to kill, to rob, to live with total sexual licence, to lie,849 which are an obvious
and deliberately reversal of conventional Buddhist morality.

850

Both historically and conceptually, yoga is in many ways an internalization of sexual

intercourse between a man and a woman. Tantric art abounds in representations of couples (and
sometimes larger groups) engaged in all manner of sexual intercourse (maithuna, yab-yum, and
so on), and most Tantric scriptures include extended discussions of sexual practice. iva and
Vajrasattva, the high gods of aiva Hindu Tantra and Buddhist Vajrayna, are themselves
depicted as engaging in endless sexual marathons with their consorts, when they (and a
number of other supernatural beings) are not portrayed as actually dwelling inside the female
organ itself.851
At this early time there is a connection between the postures of yoga and sexuality. It has
been suggested that several of the bearded figures potrayed on the aiva temples at Khajuraho
847
848
849
850
851

Urban, The Path of Power: Impurity, Kingship, and Sacrifice in Assamese Tantra, 785.
English, Vajrayogin : Her Visualizations, Rituals & Forms : A Study of the Cult of Vajrayogin in India, 41-2.
Snellgrove, Indo-Tibetan Buddhism. Indian Buddhists and Their Tibetan Successors, 174.
Samuel, Civilized Shamans. Buddhism in Tibetan Societies, 419.
White, Introduction. Tantra In Practice: Mapping a Tradition, 15.

170

are yogis participating in ritual orgies, and that some of their more convoluted poses represent
sexo-yogic attitudes or esoteric yogic sanas (postures).852 The lotus is also a sexual symbol.
Om! mani padme hum, the well-known Tantric mantra, meaning Om! jewel in the lotus,
obviously intimates that the linga is in the yoni. It is no accident that the padmsana is the
favourite posture of the gods making love, fusing the opposites, performing the Yab-Yum to
borrow a Tibetan concept- of creation.853
Tantrism identifies the bliss of enlightenment with the great bliss (mahsukha) of sexual
union. The most characteristic aspect of Tantric Buddhism generally is the extension of ritual
homologies to sexual symbolism. The thought of awakening is identified with semen,
dormant wisdom with a woman waiting to be inseminated. Therefore, wisdom (praj) is
conceived as a female deity. She is a mother (janan), as in the Prajpramit literature; she is
the female yogi (yogin); but she is also a low-caste whore (omb cal). Skillful means
(upya) are visualized as her male consort. The perfect union of these two (prajopyayuganaddha) is the union of the non-dual. Because the sexual symbolism can be understood
metaphorically, most forms of Buddhist Tantra were antinomian only in principle.

854

This

sexual union of the non-dual represents the violent undifferentiation. In (South) Indian thought
the philosophical development occurs on erotic base.855
In Buddhist tantric systems, emptiness is described experientially as the ecstatic, allconsuming great bliss, the tantric metaphor for which is orgasm. Thus, the experience of
emptiness or bliss is said to arise in or to be produced from the dharmoday, the womans
sex. As a source or origin, the dharmaoday is equated with the female sex organ or womb
(bhaga, yoni). This imagery is employed in both the Guhyasamja(yogottara) and
Hevajra(yoganiruttara) traditions, in which the root tantras famously begin. Thus have I heard:
At one time the Lord sported in the vaginas of the vajra maidens. Here, because the vagina
represents the bliss of enlightenment, it becomes another spatial metaphor for buddhahood.856
Radical world-renouncers transgressive discipline simulates the undifferentiating crime of
victim in initiatory context. As in the esoteric aiva systems, kplika and sexual practices in
the Buddhist tantras are grounded upon a metaphysics of nonduality. Its purpose is said to
counter the oridnary, conventional dualism of the mind that naturally perceives aspects of the
world as either pure or impure. Radically world-renouncing kplika practices challenge
the unenlightened dualistic tendencies of the mind, attacking the innate dichotomy of subject
and object and forcing it to break through to the experience of a nondual reality. In both nondual

852

Wendy Doniger OFlaherty, iva. The Erotic Ascetic (Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1973), 9.
Hartsuiker, Sdhus : holy men of India, 42.
854
Luis O. Gmez, Buddhism in India, in Joseph M. Kitagawa and Mark D. Cummings (ed), Buddhism and
Asian History. Religion, History, and Culture. Readings from the Encyclopedia of Religion (Mircea Eliade, Editor in
Chief) (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1987), 90.
855
Gombrich and Obeyesekere, Buddhism Transformed. Religious Change in Sri Lanka, 422.
856
English, Vajrayogin : Her Visualizations, Rituals & Forms : A Study of the Cult of Vajrayogin in India, 149.
853

171

systems, the underlying method is that of transgressive discipline or conduct of the left
(vmcra). The left(vma) in vmcra refers to the left hand, which in Indian society is
reserved for impure bodily functions and signifies impurity. The rites of the highest tantras,
however, specifically prescribe the use of the left hand. This forms a powerful contradiction of
cultural norms that rely on the use of the right hand to maintain purity. Because orthodox
brahmanical society relied upon the strictest preservation of purity, transgressive discipline set
out to undermine sanctified distinctions between pure and impure wherever possible. Thus, by
taking place in cremation grounds, and requiring ornaments of human bone, kplika
observances place the practitioner in contact with the gravest source of impurity: death. Many
highest tantric rites also involve the use of impure substances such as alcohol and bodily fluids.
Sexual regulations, traditionally essential to the preservation of class and caste structures, are
also overturned. Texts that prescribe sexual yogic practices often recommend the use of consorts
from the most taboo groups such as close relatives, or untouchable and contaminated classes.857
There is a metaphysical logic behind the deviant behaviour of the Aghors (radical worldrenouncer), which defines them as real ascetics and not just degraded madmen. They aspire to
a state of enlightenment in which there is not differentiation between opposites. The Aghor
way of dissolving this metaphysical duality is to insist unconditionally on the identity of
mundane opposites bad is good, death is life, dirthy is clean and to act it out concretely.858
Violating and undifferentiating the fundamental difference, (radical) world-renouncer plays the
role of founding victim.

7.5. Passions are Awakening: a Mimetic Reading

The terms yoga and bhoga (the latter indicating sexual enjoyment) appear often in Tantric
texts to represent the extremes of the two paths.

This Tantric goes on to explain its central

doctrine: In the Kaula doctrine, bhoga turns into yoga directly. What is sin [in conventional
religion] becomes meritorious. Sasra [worldly life] becomes Release. On one level, this is a
simple conjunction of opposites, enhanced by a felicitous assonance (bhoga-yoga, bhokamoka) the sort of proposition which is not uncommon in the crude system of the Tantras.
But it contains the seed of metaphysical as well as psychological truth, and this is developed in
the mythology. Tantrism seeks to employ the devotees natural dispositions to raise him from
the level of sin to the level of the divine.859 The trangressive sin of world-renouncing yogins

857
858
859

Ibid., 41.
Hartsuiker, Sdhus. Holy Men of India, 37.
OFlaherty, iva. The Erotic Ascetic, 258.

172

can be understood in the sense of undifferentiating crime of reconciliatory victims, a crime that
undermines or eliminates social differentiation.
Girard theory provides important stimuli in understanding transgressive dimension of
Buddhism.

Passions are awakening, and more precisely, that the sex organs are the true

abodes of awakening and nirv

a .860 Within the context of the ordained Buddhist sangha,
tantric prescriptions for sexual practice were (if possible) even more radical in that they required
a deliberate inversion of the celibate monastic code. In this way, transgressive discipline not
only overturns embedded cultural norms, it intentionally challenges the fundamental ethical and
doctrinal tenets of Buddhism. Rather the eradicating the poisons(kleas) of lust lust (rga)
and wrath(dvea), as traditional Buddhism would have it, the yogin is to use his passions as a
means of eradicating all defilements. The highest tantras explain this type of practice as
operating through a homeopathic cure(Snellgroves translation of vipartauadhikalpant,
Hevajratantra 2.2.47); it works on the same analogy as the curing of poison with another dose
of poison. In the same way, the poison of passion is said to be cured by passion (Hevajratantra
2.2.51ab). In fact, By whatever sin[ordinary] beings go to lower realms, by that same sin a
yogin quickly attains success.861
In Tantric Buddhism, as in the "homeopathic medicine, symptoms are not suppressed, but
rather - as a necessary step towards their total elimination - temporarily reinforced. In this
way, anger and desire are said to be cured by anger and desire. This path can lead both to
enlightenment as well as to a "pathological condition" (pathologische Zustand).

862

Dumoulinhas rightly pointed out the dangers of psychologically violent effort (seelische
Gewaltanstrengung) in Buddhist meditative initiation. For him, it must not be concealed, that
the Buddhist meditation techniques also hide dangers. The meditative techniques, which
aim directly at enlightenment experience, almost inevitably require psychologically violent
effort that can hurt. No one should be undertaken such exercises without trusted leadership.
There are dangerous conditions including 'Devil areas' (Teufelsbereiche) (so the errors and
illusions called in Zen) in yogic-meditative techniques. One should always beware of hypnotic
states.

863

In yogic meditation, there were, for Oldenberg, apparently visions, states of meditation
which

are

similar

to

the

pathological

(mannigfache

teilweise

ins

Pathologische

hinberspielende Zustnde der Versenkung ), and undoubtedly a developed practice of selfhypnosis. There were hallucinations in Buddhist states of meditation.864 Hans Kng865 has
860

Faure, The Red Thread. Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality, 47.

English, Vajrayogin : Her Visualizations, Rituals & Forms : A Study of the Cult of Vajrayogin in India, 42 ;
Hardy, The Religious Culture of India. Power, Love and Wisdom, 526.
862
Radmila Moacanin, Archetypische Symbole und tantrische Geheimlehren. Der tibetische Buddhismus im Licht der
Psychologie C. G. Jungs. stliche und westliche Wege zum Herzen (Interlaken, Schweiz: Ansata, 1988), 38.
863
Dumoulin, stliche Meditation und christliche Mystik, 218.
864
Hermann Oldenberg, Buddha. Sein Leben, Seine Lehre, Seine Gemeinde, ed. Helmut von Glasenapp. Stuttgart. 13.
Auflage. 1959, 331.
861

173

also pointed out the risk of hallucinations and "nervous breakdowns (Zen madness)" (ZenWahnsinn). The psychic state of over-stimulation marked by visions and hallucinations and
well known in the Zen practice (seelischer berreizung),866as we shall discuss later, can be
interpreted in the sense of ritual-initiatory simulation of mimetic crisis. For Girard,
hallucinatory effects are basic to the primordial religious experience. The Dionysiac state of
mind can and often does erase all manner of differences: familial, cultural, biological, and
natural. The entire everyday world is caught up in the whirl, producing a hallucinatory state
that is not a synthesis of elements, but a formless and grotesque mixture of things that are
normally separate. The atmosphere of terror and hallucination accompanies the primordial
religious experience. When violent hysteria reaches a peak the monstrous double looms up
everywhere at once. The decisive act of violence is directed against this awesome vision of evil.
The turmoil then gives way to calm. Hallucinations vanish and the dtente that follows only
heightens the mystery of the whole process.867
Dumoulin868 has dealt with heat (Hitze) and devils realm (Teufelsbereich ) (maky) in
Buddhist meditative process: With the intensification of meditation, meditative process become
violent and distressing. "My body was burning with heat," says a meditator. All Buddhist
masters warn of the charms of the devil area, dangerous act. Visions and hallucinations are
frequent manifestations from the devils realm and evoke particularly strong impressions on
account of increased perceptual irritability (Sinnenreizbarkeit) during meditative practice. This
increased perceptual irritability could be comprehended as ritual reproduction of mimetic crisis
in initiatory context. Maky refers to the hallucinations and perceptual distortions that can arise
during the course of meditation and can be mistaken by the practitioner as "seeing the true
nature" or kensho. Zen masters warn their meditating students to ignore sensory distortions.
These can occur in the form of visions and perceptual distortions, but they can also be
experiences of blank, trance-like absorption states. Contemplative literature contains numerous
descriptions of the perceptual distortion produced by meditation.Zen masters warn against the
fascinations of the devils realm, which are all the more dangerous the less the student
recognizes them for what they are. Confusing them with enlightenment can lead one far astray.
Thanks to the vigilance of the master, the adventures of maky usually end with the student
restored to a healthy, sober state. Heavenly beings from the Mahayanist pantheon frequently
appear as manifestations from the devils realm, setting in especially when the body begins to
become fatigued because of intensive effort.869
World-renouncing yogin as specialist of sacred and representative of festive reversal seems
to commit an undifferentiating crime in the context of initiation. Radical world-renouncer and
865
866
867
868
869

Kng, Eine christliche Antwort, 591.

Heinrich Dumoulin, Zen: Geschichte und Gestalt (Bem: Franche Verlag, 1959), 260, 282.
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 96, 160-1.
Dumoulin, Der Erleuchtungsweg des Zen im Buddhismus, 161-2.
Heinrich Dumoulin, Zen Enlightenment and Origin and Meaning (Boston:Shambhala Publications, 1979), 141-2.

174

yogin seems to represent the carnivalesque figure within a ritual framework separated from
everyday behavior. Roman Saturnalia and Buddhist tantrism provide moments of reversal
within a context of order. For Girard's theory, such festivals express the very essence of culture,
the homeopathic discharge of violence and mimetic passions, namely homeopathic use of
violence in order to control violence. On the Vajrayana path, the Tantrika attempts to drink the
poison of desire and to transform it into divinizing ambrosia. And perhaps most potent of all is
the energy of sexual desire and therefore also the most powerful fuel toward spiritual
freedom.870
Tantric Buddhists argued that the Buddha, before leaving the palace, learnt from her all the
secrets of sex, although in this case sex was not aimed at procreation.871 The paradigmatic
world-renouncer Buddha is not to be understood as a kind of sweetly reasonable Victorian
Gentleman,872 but to be conceived as yogi par excellence.873Buddha was Muni (kyaMuni). In Vedic times, Muni was the sacred person who experiences wild ecstasy. Muni is
synonymous with the Greek , ecstasy and frenzy.874 The Buddha posseses the title Skyamuni and is referred to throughout the Nikyas as muni and mah-muni.875 The world muni was
used in the g-veda hymn X, 136: The munis, girdled with the wind, wear garments soiled of
yellow hue. The Buddha is called great muni, and he adopted for his Sagha) the soiled
yellow hue of dress that was alluded to in the Vedic hymn.876
Therefore we can analyse the Dionysian surrounding the world-renouncing yogi Buddhas.
According to Girard, a good many primitive socieities attest this relationship between madness
and the sacred. They see in the madman the two faces of Gods violence and in consequence
they treat him simultaneously as a infection, a source of pollution, which must be kept at bay,
and as a possible source of blessings, a being to be venerated. In the Birth of Tragedy, and in his
work on Greek religion, despite all his intuition, Nietsche, so argues Girard, never uncovered
the real significance of the Dionysiac mania .877
This sacrificial reading of world-renouncers yoga and meditation in the light of mimetic
theory is based on understanding the interiorization of the sacrifice. The later Vedic tradition,
Heesterman argues, made a systematic effort to rationalize, marginalize, and ultimately excise
the impure aspects of the sacrifice. In place of a violent beheading the later Brahminical ritual
870

Hugh B. Urban, The Cult of Ecstasy: Tantrism, the New Age, and the Spiritual Logic of Late Capitalism, in
History of Religions 39/3 (2000), 283.
871
Shaw, Passionate Enlightenment. Women in Tantric Buddhism, 143 ; Faure, The Red Thread. Buddhist
Approaches to Sexuality, 25.
872
Schopen, Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks: Collected Papers on the Archaeology, Epigraphy, and Texts of
Monastic Buddhism in India, 258.
873
Dumoulin, stliche Meditation und christliche Mystik, 142.
874
J.W. Hauer, Der Yoga. Ein indischer Weg zum Selbst (Stuttgart : Kohlhammer, 1958), 30-1.
875
Martin G. Wiltshire, Ascetic Figures Beforeand in Early Buddhism : the Emergence of. Gautama as
the Buddha (Berlin/New York : Mouton de Gruyter, 1990), 24.
876
Alex Wayman, Buddhist Insight: Essays (Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1984), 370.
877
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 310.

175

centers around the unbloody, highly sanitized system of ritual rules. Ultimately, this process of
rationalization would culminate in the complete interiorization of the sacrifice founded in
the Upaniads: the external rite of animal slaughter has now been replaced by the symbolic
sacrifice of yoga, meditation, and the offering of the breath into the fire of the self. Yet, despite
this ongoing rationalization of the sacrifice, the problems of violence, bloodshed, and impurity
would persist throughout the long history of Indian religions.878
Girards theory of generative scapegoating account for prohibition, ritual, myth,
symbolization process and language.27 His theory can account for juxtaposition and dialectic of
order and disorder, differentiation and undifferentiation and also violent dialectic of worldrenunciation and world order. Mimetic reading of violent paradox of world-constructing worldrenunciaiton accounts for civilizational process of differentiation out of an undifferentiated
violence represented and specialized in the sacred and liminal life of Buddhist world-renouncer.

7.6. Ascetics and Courtesans: Violent Undifferentiation

The relation between the courtesan and the ascetic has long been used as expression of
nonduality.879 Courtesans and prostitutes were often the privileged interlocutors of the Buddhist
monks.880 Buddhists were fond of stories in which a bodhisattva appeared as a prostitute or
courtesan.881 iva, the mythological model of world-renouncing yogi and Buddhas is an erotic
ascetic. 882 The cultural mechanism around or against these erotic and Dionysian worldrenouncers and Buddhas could be deconstructed in the light of Girardian theory. There exists
less polished Buddhist versions of the same story about Ascetics and Courtesans which make
the rain fall as soon as the young ascetic has carried out the copulation.883 Some texts speak
also of amorous sports of ascetics (tapasvill or tapakr). The figures of these gods are
engaged in love-making innumerable times. It is difficult to understand why ascetics, famous
for their religious pursuits, should have been made to perform such repulsive acts.884
As in the case of sacred kingship, these trasgressive acts of world-renouncering ascetics can
be comprehended within the context of scapegoat mechanism. Relying on studies of primitive
societies sacrificial rites, myths and Greek tragedy, Girard suggests that it is precisely absence
or lack of differentiation which causes human violence. Order, peace and fertility are based on
878

Urban, The Path of Power: Impurity, Kingship, and Sacrifice in Assamese Tantra, 798.
Faure, The Power of Denial. Buddhism, Purity and Gender, 262.
880
Ibid., 1.
881
Faure, The Red Thread. Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality, 136.
882
OFlaherty, iva. The Erotic Ascetic.
883
J. Gonda, Ascetics and Courtesans, in J. Gonda, Selected Studies, vol. iv, History of Ancient Indian Religion
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1975), 241.
884
Ibid., 243-4.
879

176

cultural differences, despite our modern tendency to associate the presence of difference with
violence and persecution, Girard notes how the study of ethnology suggests that ritual impurity
is linked to the dissolution of differences.
The transgressive union of ascetics and courtesans seems to represent the violent
undifferentiation, especially undifferentiating crime of reconciliatory victims within the
initiatory context. The tantric texts frequently repeat the saying, By the same acts that cause
some men to burn in hell for thousands of years, the yogin gains his eternal salvation. This is
the foundation stone of the Yoga expounded by Ka in the Bhagavad Gita.885 According to
Eliade, the ritual union between the brahmacrin (lit.., chaste young man) and the pucal
(lit. prostitute) may well express a desire to effect the coincidentia oppositorum, the
reintegration of polarities, for we find the same motif in the mythologies and the iconographic
symbolism of many archaic cults The Buddhist texts also speak of maithuna, and Buddha
mentions certain ascetics who regard sensuality as one of the ways to gain nirvana.

The

conjunction of opposites constitutes the metaphysical constant of all tantric rituals and
meditations. The tantric iconography of divine couples (in Tibetan: yab-yum, father-mother),
of the innumerable forms of Buddha embraced by their aktis, constitutes the exemplary
model of maithuna.886
For Girard, it is not necessary to say, with Lvi-Strauss, that ritual is a deliberate refusal of
thought and language. There can be no question of returning to mystical formulations or their
philosophical counterparts, such as the coincidentia oppositorum, the magical power of the
negative, and the value of the Dionysian.887 Coincidentia oppositorum founded in violent
conjunction of opposites is to be conceived of as representing sacrificial crisis, a crisis of
distinctions affecting the cultural order and a regulated system of distinctions. Coincidentia
oppositorum represented by the specialist of festive sacred means violent undifferentiation in
Girards theory. The reconciliatory victim is believed to undifferentiate a societys system of
differences. Sacrificial crisis produces the convergence of all enemy brothers against a third
party considered responsible for the disorder. World-renoucer seems to undifferenciate cultural
system of caste and difference and thereby represent sacrificial crisis.
Buddha himself, if we are to believe the mythology of the tantric cycle, had set the example
of anti-social and transgressive maithuna.

888

All the mythologies and techniques of the

conjunction of opposites are homologizable; iva- akti and Buddha- akti can be translated
into any union (i and pigal, kualin and iva.etc.). Every conjunction of opposites,
so Eliade writes, produces a rupture of plane and ends in the rediscovery of the primordial
spontaneity.889For the appropriate understanding of this violently undifferentiating conjunction
885
886
887
888
889

Mircea Eliade, Yoga, Immortality and Freedom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 263.
Ibid., 256-9.
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 62-3.
Eliade, Yoga, Immortality and Freedom, 263.
Ibid., 265.

177

and confusion of opposites, Girards insights into primordial lack of differentiation and the
original chaos seems to be more convincing rather than Eliades romantic and idyllic view on
rediscovery of the primordial spontaneity. Often the beginning of the myth, according to
Girard, can be reduced to a single characteristic. Day and night are confused; heaven and earth
communicate; gods move among men and men among gods. Among god, man, and beast there
is little disctintion. Sun and moon are twins; they fight constantly and cannot be distinguished
one from the other. The confusion of day and night signifies the absence of sun and the
withering of everything. Clearly, for Girard, myth involves a lack of differentiation. The great
social crisis that engender collective persecutions are experienced as a lack of differentiation.
Lack of differentiation in myth sometimes had idyllic connotations. Those elements that are
indistinguishable often have conflictual connotations. This theme, Girard says, is
particularly developed in the post-Vedic texts of Brahman India. Everything always begins with
an interminable, indecisive battle between gods and demons who are so alike one can hardly tell
them apart. The undifferentiated is only a partially mythical translation of this state of affairs.
Girard associates with it the theme of twins or fraternal enemies who illustrate the conflict
between those who become undifferentiated in a particularly graphic fashion. Lvi-Strauss,
for Girard, was the first to identify the unity of numerous mythical beginnings in terms of a lack
of differentiation. For him the undifferentiated is purely rhetorical; it serves as a background for
the display of differences.890
Thus Buddhist seemingly idyllic logic of nonduality or Buddhist conjunction of opposites
must be re-read in terms of violent and conflictual confusion and undifferentiation of
differences. This Buddhist undifferentiated (logic of nonduality, identity of nirvana and samsara,
yogic conjunction of opposites and so on) could be comprehended in terms of a lack of
differentiation in Girards theory. As noted earlier, Girard criticizes Claude Lvi-Strauss who
asserts that ritual tries to retrieve an undifferentiated immediacy. Unlike immediacy, the
notion of undifferentiated, as Girard argues, corresponds to part of what goes on rituals all
over

the

world:
891

antagonistes).

violent

undifferentiation

(indiffrenciation

violente,

lidentit

des

Rituals, as Girard maintains, are not committed to this undifferentiated once

and for all. All great traditional interpretations, notably the Hindu and the Chinese, attribute to
ritual the end which Lvi-Strauss would reserve to myth alone: differentiation.892
Whatever the secondary or symbolical interpretation given of these reliefs representing
amatory couples (transgressiv union of acetics and courtesans) - the union of purua and prakti
or essence and substance, the ultimate union of the soul with the divine, their more practical
function as magico-religious lightning-conductors. These representations of Dionysian couples
occurred, as Gonda maintains, also on Buddhist monuments even from early times and are
890
891
892

Girard, The Scapegoat, 30-1.

Girard, Das Heilige und die Gewalt, 110.
Girard, Differentiation and Undifferentiation in Levi-Strauss and Current Criticial Theory.

178

sometimes very profusely applied originate in fertility belief, including also the belief in the
luck-bringing functions of these reliefs.893
According to Parry,894 much of the endeavour of the world-renouncer may be seen as an
attempt to recapture the original state of non-differentiation and to re-establish the unity of
opposites which existed before the world began. World-renouncer seems to represent la nondiffrence dionysiaque.895 In world-renouncer, as the extra-mundane individual, a special kind
of sacredness is reserved. With his negation of the world and his asceticism, he represents that
very reversal of values which we expected to find in festivals.896
For Girard, difference and cultural order emerges out of violent undifferentiation. World
order and the caste system of difference emerges out of world-renunciation that specializes and
represents violent, festive and Dionysian undifferentiation. The mimetic symmetry, giving rise
to disorder and violence is stablized by the mechanism of reconcilatory victim. World order is
stablized by the sacred and festive anti-structure of world-renunciation. The culture which
comes into being through this mechanism will have a structure based upon asymmetry and
differences constituting cultural order. For Girard, the festival is nothing more than a
reenactment of the sacrificial crisis, or rather of its resolution by means of the surrogate
victim.897
Radical world-renouncer seeks to represent the Dionysian state of undifferentiation: The
ascetic becomes the consort of the prostitute, the menstruating prostitute becomes the goddess,
beating a blessing, the cremation ground a place of worship, a skull the food-bowl and
excrement and putrid flesh food, and pollution becomes indistinguishable from purity. Duality is
abolished, polarities are recombined, and the Aghori thus recaptures the primordial state of nondifferentiation. 898 World-renouncer attempts to represent this violent undifferentiation in
Girards terminology. In mythology, all monsters, kings, heroes, and gods simultaneously
embody differences, thus blurring distinctions as a sacrificial crisis would. The reconciliatory
victim always bears traits of the monstrous. Scapegoat is a symbol of undifferentiation.
Ritual impurity, as Girard notes, is linked to the dissolution of differences. The ritually and
socially impure and transgressive union between high ascetics and low prostitute simulates
indiffrenciation violente. The female partner should ideally be a prostitute or a woman of one
of the lowest castes. She should also be menstruating at the time and thus doubly polluted. But
what is also significant is that the sexual intercourse which is supposed to occur is a calculated
repudiation of procreation.899 Since low-caste women occupy the bottom of the social hierarchy,
893

Gonda, Ascetics and Courtesans, 244.

Parry, Sacrificial Death and the Necrophagous Ascetic, 86.
895
Girard, Das Heilige und die Gewalt, 203.
896
Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus. The Caste System and Its Implications. Complete Revised English Edition
(Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), 279.
897
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 302.
898
Parry, Sacrificial Death and the Necrophagous Ascetic, 100.
899
Parry, Sacrificial Death and the Necrophagous Ascetic, 91.
894

179

their elevation in Tantric practice and symbolism brings about religious insight by an
inversion, or coincidentia oppositorum.900
Myths, according to Girard, display the same mimetic process as the Gospels, but usually in
an obscure and confused way.901 The presence of sacred prostitutes within the precincts of
Buddhist temples as characters in theatrical representations and as protagonists of sermons
and tales continued to remain an indispensable element.902 Buddhist mythographers resorted to
outcasts (hinin) (an outcast courtesan) 903 as filters between the deity and the people,
scapegoats of exclusion without whom monks could not engage in their discussion with the
sacred. The paradigm of the shamaness/courtesan/bodhisattva became a common topic in one
strain of anecdotal literature of the Japanese Middle Ages that asked the courtesan to play the
role of spokeswoman for the Buddha. Examples of the Buddhist appropriation of shamanic
concepts and of the metaphorical reading of courtesans centered around famous holy men
whose enlightenment is described as the result of female intervention. Through the death of the
defiled scapegoat, sacred courtesan was sacralized as Buddhist bodhisattva: The association
between the holy men, the shamaness/courtesan, and bodhisattva Fugen took place in the
anecdotal literature of the thirteenth century, mainly the Kojidan and the Senjsh. Whenever
the Buddhist monk reopens his eyes, the courtesan appears, again singing her luring song, until
she suddenly dies and a fragrance spreads through the sky to indicate her arrival to the Pure
Land. The death of the defiled scapegoat assures Shk of a perfect Buddhist realizations as
well as protecting him and the common people from the threat of defilement.904
It is not difficult to uncover the accusation of which the victim was the object. The
accusation makes the victim responsible for the disorder and catastrophe, in other words for the
mimetic crisis, that afflicts the community. Mimetic crisis is almost always a matter of two
brothers or enemy twins, such as Cain and Abel or Romulus and Remus, who at once make and
reveal the universal antagonism of doubles at the height of a crisis. One of the brothers must die
in order for the doubles to disappear, in other words in order to provide for the reappearance of
difference and the subsequent founding of the city.905
One of the symmetrical, undifferentiating doubles (Buddhist monks and sacred prostitutes)
must die in order to provide for the reappearance of difference. During the mimetic crisis, the
victim is only one antagonist among others, a double among others, their twin enemy, until
mimetic polarization succeeds in converging all the signs of crisis and reconciliation on the
victim. The victim them becomes extremely significant and specific. The passage from the end

900

Shaw, Passionate Enlightenment. Women in Tantric Buddhism, 60.

Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 104.
902
Michele Marra, The Buddhist Mythmaking of Defilement: Sacred Courtesans in Medieval Japan, in The
Journal of Asian Studies 52/ 1 (1993), 51.
903
Ibid., 57.
904
Ibid., 55-6.
905
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 38-9.
901

180

of doubling to the return of differentiation, occurs through the victim

7.7. Dionysian Logic of Tragic World-Renouncer

The transgressive and undifferentiating union of the courtesan and the monk906 can be
read as a kind of undifferentiated symmetries in the relationship between doubles in Girards
theory. Members of the nonresident groups (hinin) such as slave traders, hunters, and courtesans
replied to the Buddhist call for ritual scapegoats, taking defilements upon themselves and
becoming privileged characters in medieval theatrical representations.907
By transforming the courtesan into a Buddha-to-be (bodhisattva), Buddhist mythographers
has silenced and erased the danger of defiled margins in the name of a process of spiritual
realization. Much of the literature on the Buddhist monk man focuses on the fundamental role
played by sacred courtesans in the process of Shks enlightenment. The chief courtesan of
Kanzaki appears to him as bodhisattva Fugen. An impure but sacred courtesan guides Shk
through the complicated Buddhist philosophy of nondifferentiation. Buddhist philosophy of
nondifferentiation that was originally philosophy of world-renouncer seems to represent violent
undifferentation in Girards theory. The ghost of the unknown courtesan is pacified and
cleansed of impurities by the sacred waters of the Buddhist ocean of nondifferentiation.908
After the violent death of the courtesans, a female carriers of defilement, she is sacralized
as Buddhist bodhisattva. The secret of the mechanism of sacralization of courtesans lies in the
sacred misunderstanding regarding reconciliatory victims. The mechanism of mimetic
reconciliation takes its beginning in the sacralization of reconciliatory victim. The exorcising
of female defilement put an end to the fear of the unknown, thanks to the mythographers
power to prove that to use the words of a female Buddhist believer Izumi obtained salvation
in the next world in spite of the depths of her sins.909 Girards theory on surrogate victim
mechanism provide us with some insights that may bear relevance to this question of the
mystified mechanism hidden in the seemingly radically altruistic story of Bodhisattva. Girards
theory on victimage mechanism can shed light on the story of self-sacrifice performed by the
bodhisattva. These are jumping from a cliff, self-immolation, and cutting oneself into pieces. In
the text, these practices of self-sacrifice are said to be for the purpose of enlightening sentient
beings to realize Buddhahood. 910 Buddhist world-renuncer attains nirvna through self-

906

Faure, The Power of Denial. Buddhism, Purity and Gender, 270.

Marra, The Buddhist Mythmaking of Defilement: Sacred Courtesans in Medieval Japan, 58.
908
Ibid., 51, 59, 63.
909
Ibid., 55, 52, 63.
910
Cheng-mei Ku, A Ritual of Mahayana Vinaya: Self-Sacrifice, in Buddhist Thought and Ritual. David J.
Kalupahana (ed) (New York: Paragon House, 1991), 167.
907

181

immolation.911
The Dionysian dimension in Buddhism, especially in the festive union of world-renouncing
Buddhist monks and impure courtesans can be well explained in the light of victimage
mechanism. As Marra912 argues, the Buddhist institution, according to Marra, attempts to
rationalize a disruptive dionysian cult of fertility that they condemn as sinful practice but
uphold as an accomplishment leading to spiritual enlightenment. Structural parallels and great
many points of similarity with respect to their character and modes of manifestation of iva in
India and Dionysos in ancient Greece has been pointed out. In the Great Epic, iva as
Mahyogin, is the patron deity of those who abide in the forest and of wandering ascetics. He is
seen dancing in the crematoria (mana) which always lie in lonely and deserted areas, in the
company of ghosts and goblins.913 For the Greeks and Romans, Dionysus was essentially the
god of wine and vitality; of ritual madness; of the mask and the theater.
Faure has noted another Buddhist topos of the courtesan as avatar of bodhisattva Guanyin
presenting her with the seductive features of Guanyin with the Fishbasket or of the Wife of
Mr. Ma (Malang fu). Guanyin leads men to awakening by adapting herself to their passions, in
particular by fulfilling their sexual desire. In the legend of the Wife of Mr. Ma, for instance,
she appears as a young girl who, following a well-known folkloric motif, promises to marry the
most worthy of her suitors, a young man named Horse (Ma). However, this is a fools bargain,
as she dies during the wedding night, before their union has been consummated.914 According
to a story in circulation during the Tang Dynasty there was a beautiful woman of about twentyfour who lived alone in the city of Yen-Chou in Shensi and was loved by all the young men in
the city. She would never refuse what the young men requested of her. She died very young and
since she had no relatives, she was buried by the roadside. During the Ta-li period (766-779) a
monk from Central Asia arrived in the city and offered incense at her grave. When the people
asked why he honored the grave of such a voluptuous woman, he replied that she was in
reality a great sage whose great compassion for all led her to grant whatever was requested of
her. She was, in fact, he said, the Bodhisattva of the Chained Bones. If they doubted this, he
went on, all they needed to do was to open the grave and see. When the people did so, they
found her bones interlocked with one another. Such a story as this might very well have been
created within the environment of Tantric Buddhism.915
Girards explanation of sacred kingship in the sense of surrogate victim mechanism provides
insight into the relationship between Japanese kingship and image of jade woman as initiators
found in Japanese Buddhism. This image developed in the context of the Buddhist cult of relics
911

Ray, Buddhist Saints in India. A Study in Buddhist Values & Orientations, 188.
Marra, The Buddhist Mythmaking of Defilement: Sacred Courtesans in Medieval Japan, 62.
913
J. Bruce Long, iva and Dionysos Versions of Terror and Bliss, in Numen. International Review for the
History of Religions 18/3 (1971) .
914
Faure, The Red Thread. Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality, 118-9.
915
Chen, Buddhism in China. A Historical Survey, 333.
912

182

and of the discourse on Japanese kingship. Its locus classicus is the famous dream in which the
bodhisattva Kannon appeared to the young Shinran and told him: If you, the practitioner, due to
past karma, must violate women, I will become a jade woman to be violated by you. The socalled jade woman was perceived as an avatar of Kannon.916
Girard follows Frazers hypotheses and focuses on the idea that the hermeneutical key to
interpreting sacred kingship is to consider the king as scapegoat. According to Girard, regicide
is explicable by reference to its scapegoat function. Girard considers a group of sacred
monarchies, in which the king is required to commit an transgressive act of incest, either real or
symbolic, on certain solemn occasions notably, at his enthronement or in the course of the
periodic rites of renewal. 917 In societies where the incestuous act is no longer actually
consummated, it ever was a symbolism of incest persists. The important role played by the
queen mother can only be understood in that context. In Girards view, committing incest
prepares the king for his role as scapegoat and thereby as a sacrificial victim.
Some forms of ritual transgression were legitimized by Buddhism in the name of the
raison dtat, for instance in the case of sexual esoteric rites performed for the emperor, or the
enthronement rites (sokui kanj) performed by him. This, taking place at the time of the
enthronement, used a strongly sexual symbolism to renew magically the fertility and
prosperity of the imperial house and the vitality of the ruler. Although admittedly exceptional,
the case of Emperor Kazan having sex with a lady-in-waiting during the accession ceremony
reveals, according to Faure, a latent tendency.918 For Girard, unwillingness to acknowledge the
paradox of the sovereign victim tends to efface exactly what the victim represents, the truth of
the founding violence. Girard claims that in an attempt to make the mystery of violence and the
sacred, of the sovereign victim and the sacrificial king, acceptable, Rudolf Otto proposes his
famous concept of the numinous.919
The undifferentiating and transgressive union between the king/Buddhist monk and divine
child can be also explained by the theory of victimage mechanism. We are confronted with the
motif of the suffering of the divine (or immortal) child in Buddhist texts. The sexual act
commited by the king (or the priest) with a youth perceived as an avartar of Kannon becomes in
itself a sacred act. It is sanctified by the enthronement ritual. The point that the enthronement
rite appeared through the intermediary of sex (and more precisely homosexual sex) is elaborated
in the chigo kanj, a ritual of the Eshin branch of Tendai.920 Girards theory on the nexsus
between violence and the sacred elucidates the central role of the chigo in Buddhist Tendai, at
the heart of the symbolic device of royal enthronement. Repeated transgression by the king
and the youth Jid has become a driving force in the transmission of the rite. The chigo, all
916
917
918
919
920

Faure, The Power of Denial. Buddhism, Purity and Gender, 205-6.

Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 104.
Faure, The Red Thread. Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality, 142.
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 67.
Faure, The Red Thread. Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality, 260.

183

chigo, are said to be avatars of Buddhist bodhisattva Kannon.921

A forbidden action that is turned into a basic duty of surrogate victim does not remain a
crime for long. The forbidden and the obligatory, Girard argues, are opposites that cannot fail to
react on each other when combined. The fact that the scapegoats crimes tend to become
initiation tests or even, ultimately, acts of bravado does not permit us to doubt the initially
criminal character of the required deeds. The former crimes of the scapegoat have become
coronation rites. Scapegoats crimes are gradually emptied of their original criminal
meaning. The king must become the criminal the scapegoat has always been.922
As Faure points out, the chigo is introduced into the sacred area by the officiating priest
(ajari), where, the upper part of his body naked, he will receive initiatory mudrs, before putting
on makeup. He then ascends the high seat, and is treated as an emperor. In a sense, he is a
double of the adolescent Shtoku Taishi, who as both the ideal ruler and a manifestation of
bodhisattva Kannon. The chigo has become ritually identified with Kannon that he can be
forced. Following the hongaku notion that defilements are awakening, sexual transgression
with a chigo involves no culpability, provided that the chigo has duly received the abhieka,
that is, that he is bodhisattva Kannon. The chigo whom the priest rapes is at the same time a
potential savior, and the priest rapes him while worshipping him as an avatar and a double of the
emperor. 923
Girards theory will help us to understand this transgressive union in the sense of the
undifferentiated symmetries in the relationship between doubles. With his sexual transgression
with a chigo, Buddhist world-renouncer who represents the festive reversal of values (Dumont)
commits an undifferentiating crime of surrogate victim in his Buddhist path of initiation. In
Girards view, the mock king reigns over a festival that is brought to a proper sacrificial
conclusion by his own death. The theme of festival and the theme of sacrifice of a true or
simulated king are closely associated. For Girard, the festival is nothing more than a
reenactment of the sacrificial crisis, or rather of its resolution by means of the surrogate victim.
Whenever the restoration of unity is personally attributed to the surrogate victim, he is seen as
divine, royal, sovereign.924
Buddhist path toward enlightenment seems to be achieved only through a process leading to
the sacrifice of the chigo and the destruction of his world. Another interesting story is that of
Kakunyo, a chigo of Hieizan. Rumor of the beauty of this boy reached a priest of Miidera,
Jchin, who eventually kidnapped him. The medieval chigo, whose enactment of sexual
inversion made him a central figure of entertainment arts (gein), and who was also at the
center of monastic ritual, came to embody this paradox. Mimetic theory on generative
mechanism shed light on the Buddhist story concerning Dionysian transgression of world-

921
922
923
924

Ibid., 278.
Girard, Job: The Victim of His People, 88-9.
Faure, The Red Thread. Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality, 261.
Ren Girard, Violence and the Sacred (New York/London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005), 302.

184

renouncer with a chigo as tragic figure.925 There were the sacrifice of orphans or the
immolation of young defenceless virgins in the ancient world in early Greece, in the
Mesoamerican cultures, and other places.926
Faure sees chigo as a rather crude ideological cover-up for a kind of institutionalized
prostitution or rape, in spite of some euphemization. The child in premodern Japan risked
starvation or being sold into slavery.927 Stories of children abducted and/or sold are common in
medieval literature. The chigo were often victims of violence. Although in all the medieval
legends, at the end of their sufferings they appear as deities, in reality, as Faure argues, they
were often sacrificed on the altar of male love, and their redemption remained a pious wish (or
pious lie). We can see reconciliatory victim in Girardian sense in many stories of
undifferentiating union between Buddhist world-renouncer and chigo. One chigo shrine is on
the west of Hirosawa Pond. According to tradition, Kanch of Henchji ascended once
[temporarily] to heaven, and no one knew where he was. His attendant chigo, suffering from the
separation, threw himself in the pond, and died. A shrine was built, where he was worshiped.
Faure sees a scapegoat in this story: We seem to have here a suicide turned into sacrifice, a
kind of Girardian scapegoat. Does not their divinization perhaps simply reflect the fact that they
served as victims ? 928
Some difficulties consisting in deconstructing Buddhist mythological sacred seems to be
related to the (western) romanticization of Buddhism. For Girard, what prevents the
mythologists from discovering the truth of expulsion is, not the intrinsic difficulty of the task,
but their excessive respect for ancient Greece, a respect that has lasted for centuries and that
has come to be extended to all non-Western cultures. This undue respect is a function of the
anti-Western und especially anti-Chrisitian ideology that prevents the demystification of
mythic forms, which we are now really in a position to decipher. According to Girard, in the
myths we are dealing with the same themes as in the witch-hunts. Though these myths are
structured in the same fashion, they are falsely perceived as indecipherable.929 Girard goes on to
say: If we questioned the good faith of Indian mysticism or Buddhist scripture in the manner
that we do the Gospels, we would be suspected of an ethnocentric bias. In our contemporary
intellectual world, the Gospels alone are always fair game. Our effort to prove that we are free
of ethnocentric bias may well be part of a new ethnocentrism that consists in Western thinkers
immolating their own cultural and religious treasure on an altar of false reuniciation.930
Because of the euphemization of exploitation through a mystical discourse,931 scapegoat
mechanism hidden in the process of the divinization of the scapegoat as Buddhist bodhisattva
cannot be easily recognized. Feminization of the boy inherent in male love and transvestism
could at times lead to transsexuality threatening gender differences. It is above all a gender
925
926
927
928
929
930
931

Faure, The Red Thread. Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality, 264-5.

Girard, Job: The Victim of His People, 94.
Faure, The Red Thread. Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality, 265, 268-9.
Ibid., 269, 274.
Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 75.
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 251.
Faure, The Red Thread. Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality, 275.

185

transgression. In Girardian terminology, it signifies indiffrenciation violente. For Faure, the

estheticism of Buddhist monks (and of modern scholars like Inagaki) covers up rather sordid
realities, and sets little store by the devastated lives and psychological harm caused by this
practice. The euphemized violence thus is characteristic of the chigo monogatari and artistic
representation of the divine child. Girards theory of scapegoat mechanism helps us to uncover
the sacrificial realities hidden behind the estheticism of Buddhist monks. By using Girardian
analysis of sacred kingship, we have understood the central role of the chigo in Tendai at the
heart of the symbolic device of royal enthronement and repeated transgression by the king and
the youth within the context of the scapegoat mechanism.932
Greek tragedy is interested in reversal as such. 933 In Buddhist Tanrism, revesal and
inversion are the name of the game, one should therefore not be surprised to see the allegedly
inferior, that is, women, exalted as superior. This symbolic reversal does not affect in practice
the socially inferor status of women. 934 Such an inversion is precisely what allows the
bodhisattva to consummate the sexual act without being defiled by it. We are told, for
instance, that the Korean priest nhyo
W
(617 -686) did not hesitate to transgress Buddhist
precepts by frequently visiting brothels. Buddhism remained, as Faure argues, ambivalent
concerning its condemnation of transgression. Apparent transgression of the buddhas,
bodhisattvas, and saints935 could be best understood in the light of surrogate victim mechanism.
Wnhyos writing on bodhisattva precepts to outline his Mahyna Buddhist ethics was
interpreted by Park in connection with Derridas discussion on violence and the law. The
philosophies of both Wnhyo and Derrida is said to share a non-substantialist position and
thus mark the limits of normative ethics. Wnhyo, the Unbridled belongs to the mad monk
tradition and paradigm of East Asian Buddhism. The scope of his unbridled nature encompasses
realms that, to normal people, could mean a violation of monastic precepts or ethical codes.
Wnhyo was said to be the first transgressor in the Mahyna Buddhist tradition: a perennial
exemplar is Vimalakrti, whose transgression of precepts was inscribed in the text and
interpreted in the Mahyna tradition as an instance of overcoming of precepts hence the
Mahynist logic that transgression is non-transgression. Wnhyo, no doubt, has been a
representative figure in the category of the mad monks in Korean Buddhism. One
hermeneutic device to suprress the stigma of being abnormal and to interpret transgression
as a higher form of realizing Buddhist teaching of non-obstruction among things) is said to be
a genesis of hagiography. In a hagiography, events in ones biography becomes heavily charged
with religious and philosophical meaning. Wnhyo s violation of precepts was followed by
disrobing, but endorsed as a bodhisattvic action of unhinderance. Wnhyo wanted to literally
act out the transference of merits. Transgression of precepts was understood an inevitable
stage to realize bodhisattva spirit and the realization of the Buddhist vision. Wnhyos life
932
933
934
935

Ibid., 277-8.
Ren Girard, Violence and the Sacred (New York/London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005), 159.
Faure, The Red Thread. Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality, 280-1.
Ibid., 99-100.

186

contradicts his own views on bodhisattva ethics as exposed in his works on bodhisattva
precepts. Buddhist world-renouncer like Wnhyo wishes to become a field of merit for others
while breaking the precepts. How do we reconcile the seeming contradiction between
Wnhyos moral teaching and his life of transgression ? 936
Girards seminal insights into violence and the sacred rather than Derridas discussion on
violence and the law provides one hermeneutic device to interpret the seeming contradiction
between Wnhyos moral teaching and his life of inevitable transgression in his patho of yogic
initiation. A mad and transgressive Wnhyo, a festive and Dionysian world-renouncer as
reconcilatory victim wishes to become a field of merit for others while breaking the precepts,
having the stigma of being abnormal.
To Plato, most poetry and mythology is a mimetic loss of differentiation and the
concomitant production of undifferentiated monsters. All art is closely related to the
undifferentiation of orgiastic rituals.937 We can read this mimetic loss of differentiation in the
stories about the sexually undifferentiated monsters of Buddha couples.

VI. World Renunciation and World Order

4.

Mimetic Crisis and Interiorization of Sacrifice

1.1. Buddha is Burning: Interiorization of Sacrificial Fire

Buddha is "burning". The Buddha "burns" with heat because he is practising asceticism
(tapas).938 The Dhammapada (387) says that the Buddha is "burning," and Tantric texts assert
that the awakening of the kundalini is manifested by a burning. In his essay Die Interiorisierung
des Opfers und der Aufstieg des Selbst (atman), Heesterman has described the interiorization
of sacrifice and interiorization of fire. 939 Interiorization of sacrifice means not only
reduction of violence in the sacrifice, but also substitution of sacrificial material (Substitution
der Opfermaterie or Reduzierung bzw. Substituierung der Opfersubstanz ). 940 The worldrenouncer becomes sacrificial fire.941
936

Jin Y. Park, Transgression and Ethics of Tension. Wnhyo and Derrida on Institutional Authority, in Youru
Wang, Deconstruction and the Ethical in Asian thought ( London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 160-70.
937
Girard, "To Double Business Bound": Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology, 168.
938
Mircea Eliade, Yoga. Unsterblichkeit und Freiheit (Frankfurt am Main: Insel Verlag, 1988), 340.
939
See 3. Interiorisierung des Feuers (Heesterman, Die Interiorisierung des Opfers und der Aufstieg des Selbst
(atman), 292).
940
Jan C. Heesterman, Anfragen und Gesprchbeitrge, in Der Hinduismus als Anfrage an christliche Theologie
und Philosophie, ed. Andreas Bsteh (Mdling: St Gabriel 1997), 321-3.
941
Michaels, Der Hinduismus. Geschichte und Gegenwart, 355.

187

The practice of shaving the head is well-attested as a symbol of cutting off worldrenouncing Buddhas desires. The ushnisha (ua) as a cranial protuberance on the top of the
Buddhas skull can be understood in the light of ritual interiorization of sacrificial fire. Ushnisha
(ua) as a characteristic attribute of all Buddhas symbolizes spiritual fire (Geistesfeuer,
rasmi) through yogic meditation.942 The cranial protuberance on the Buddha's skull (ushnisha)
becomes symbolic of the enlightenment realised by a yogi and proceeds flames. Ushnisha is
derived from ush to be flaming, to be fiery. This is to be understood in the process of
internalization of sacrifice and of sacrificial fires. The legends of Buddha and other Buddhist
and Hindu saints and sages show tirelessly the old themes of the "inner heat and flames, the
flames from the bony protuberace on the top of the skull.943 A Tathagata is said to be like a
burned- out fire (Majjhima- nikaya, I, 485 jf.)
Like this, the Buddha image heads are commonly represented with a protuberance on the top
of the skull. While these features have been explained as one of the major signs with which a
mahpurua is endowed, the depiction of hair on the skull of a person who had cut off his hair
while renouncing the world has baffled scholars of Buddhist art and has been the subject matter
of great controversy.944 The vast majority of extant Buddha figures belong to the type with a
definite cranial protuberance (ua), the whole head together with the protuberance being
covered by small short curls. This type appears about the middle of the second century A.D.,
and rapidly becomes the general rule in Mathur and in Gandhra, spreading from both areas to
the Far East and to the south-east of Asia. In a comparatively late form, commonest in Siam, but
not unknown in Southern India and Ceylon, the ua is surmounted by a pointed flame. What
is an ua (Pli, uhsa ) ? Later tradition, both liteary and plastic, makes it a bony
protuberance on the top of the Buddhas skull.945
Buddha images from Buddha Gay, Nland and Ngapa
anam in India have a flame-like
ua on the top of the head. A feature that could have been copied from the Sinhalese
Buddhas is the flame-like ua which is very prominent in the Sukhodaya Buddhas. This idea
no doubt originated in India, where it is referred to in litarary sources. The following reference
to the ua appears in the Saddharma-puarka in the form of a question. By reason of what
Jna is it that the Tathgatas cranial protuberance (murdhny- ua) shines ? In the
Lalitavistara this question is answered as follows: When the Buddha is in samdhi, a ray, called
the ornament of the Light of Gnosis (Jna ) proceeding from the opneing in the cranial
protuberance (ua ) moves above his head. There was a belief that this rami proceeded from
Buddhas head and in some of the images of the Gupta period took the form of a halo around
942

Otto Karow, Symbolik des Buddhismus (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann Verlag,1989), 187-8.
Mircea Eliade, Das Mysterium der Wiedergeburt. Versuch ber einige Initiationstypen (Frankfurt am Main: Insel
Verlag, 1988), 200.
944
Yuvraj Krishan, The Buddha Image: Its Origin and Development (Delhi:Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, 1996), 111.
945
Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, The Buddhas c, Hair, ua, and Crown, in Journal of the Royal Asiatic
Society (1928), 815-841.
943

188

the head of the Buddha. That this idea of a halo reached South-east Asia also is apparent from
the back of the heads of certain statues which show vestiges of a halo which was once attached.
Other early Buddhas had only an ua on the top of the head.946
In both Mahyna and Theravda traditions, the Buddha image has come to be credited
with radiance and a fiery energy. It has also become the focus of an elaborate iconography,
such that its sacredness and potency were intensified. In the traditional belief, moreover, every
Buddha image inherits some fraction of the teja, fiery engery, which the Buddha himself
possessed in incalculable abundance, and which is conventionally represented by a fiery halo,
a flame springing from the top of the head, the gilded surfaces of bronze or stone, and so
on.947
In his book Zen and the brain: toward an understanding of meditation and consciousness,
James H. Austin has interpreted this cranial protuberance or cerebral protrusion as a
expansion of consciousness: Early Indian sculptors started to depict the Buddha with a
rounded lump on the top of his head. This protrusion, the ushnisha, long anticipated the
bumps of the Western phrenologists of the last century. It was designed to represent an
upward extension of the contents of the cranial cavity. In this manner, for Austin, successive
articsts symbolized the fact that enlightenment conferred an expansion of consciousness, an
enlargement of insight-wisdom, and the enhancement of mental capacities in general. Thus,
Zen training means brain training.948
This sacrificial reading of Buddhist world-renunciation is assisted by sacrificial
interpretation of renunciation: the sanysa (world-renunciation) initiation ceremony and even
the sanysin (world-renouncer) lifestyle are analysed as a sort of transposition of sacrifice to
the interior of the person.949 Yogis body is identified with the place of sacrifice (Opferplatz,
devayajanam). This place of sacrifice is interiorized in Yog.950 World-renouncers own
person becomes at once the seat of, and the raw material for, a burning up, a permanent
oblation, offered upon that internal flame.951 World-renouncer is fire.952 It is the sacrificer
himself who is transformed into the sacrificial oblation.953
Thus the theme of burning Buddhas could be explained in terms of ritual transformation of
the fire sacrifice (agnihotra) from an external, ritualized act into a interiorized yogic
practice.954 The inner fire of tapas is related- and in a sense opposed to the outer fire of the
946

W. M. Sirisena, Sri Lanka and South-East Asia: Political, Religious and Cultural Relations from
A. c.1000 to c.1500 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1978), 147.
947
Tambiah, The Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets, 203-4.
948
James H. Austin, Zen and the Brain: Toward an Understanding of Meditation and Consciousness, MIT Press,
1999, 11.
949
Malamoud, Cooking the World. Ritual and Thought in Ancient India, 106.
950
Hertha Krick, Nrya abali und Opfertod, inWiener Zeitschrift fr die Kunde Sdasiens 21 (1977), 107-8.
951
Malamoud, Cooking the World. Ritual and Thought in Ancient India, 47.
952
Michaels, Der Hinduismus. Geschichte und Gegenwart, 355.
953
Malamoud, Cooking the World. Ritual and Thought in Ancient India, 5.
954
King, Orientalism and Religion. Postcolonial theory, India and the mystic East, 122.

189

fire-sacrifice. iva as Mahayogi is the tapasv par excellence. The tapasv internalizes the
sacrificial fire; in fact, he becomes the sacrifice; he burns within, increases his inner heat and
thus his spiritual power.955 To renounce is, according to Malamoud,956 to raise ones tapas to
that temperature at which a fusion occurs between the divinity, sacrifice and victim and this
is both the climax and final death of a sacrifice. This then, is cooking the world. As
Olivelle957 points out, whatever a world-renouncer eats becomes a sacrifice offered in the
internal fires. The internalized ritual is more permanent and more sublime. The worldrenouncers internal fires are permanently lit; he kindles them with every breath. His eating
becomes a sacrificial offering. His body and bodily functions are transformed into a long
sacrificial session. The world-renouncers body thus becomes a sacred object. It is equal to the
fire altar where the Vedic rites are performed. In this ritual development, substitution of
sacrificial material as well as reduction of sacrificial violence has been accomplished.958
The complex ceremony which marks ones entry into world renunciation consists of
allowing ones sacrificial fires to extinguish after having incinerated ones sacrificial utensils, as
an ultimate fuel source, in a final oblation. Ones fires are not abolished for all this. They are
rather internalized, inhaled. Sacrificial fires are made to mount back into oneself
(samropaa).959 Of vital importance to the yogic tradition is the fact that the sacrificial fires
in question are gathered together within world-renouncers body. They serve both as a
cremation pyre by which the now-obsolete mundane, social body of world-renouncer is shown
to have truly died to the world and, in the postcrematory existence of the sannysin (the
renouncer), as the seat of sacrifice, which has now been internalized. It is here, in the inner
fires of tapas, which fuel the offerings of ones vital breaths in the inner sacrifice known as the
prgnihotra, that the practice of yoga very likely had its theoretical origins.960
World-renouncers very act of existence is transformed into a perfect and internal
sacrifice. The very act of world renunciation is a great act of ritual sacrifice.961Collins

962

has pointed out the internalization of the sacrifice in the life of the renouncer: In nonBrahmanical religion, the life of the Buddhist world-renouncer and his support by the laity
simply replaces the support of Brahmanical sacrifice by its patrons. Thus for Buddhism, the
highest form of sacrifice is said to be the life of a world-renouncing monk. The external ritual is
refracted into the inner life of the individual. In the same way the Buddhist Kadanta Sutta

955
956
957
958
959
960
961
962

Hartsuiker, Sdhus : holy men of India, 109.

Malamoud, Cooking the World. Ritual and Thought in Ancient India, 47-8.
Olivelle, Sanysa Upaniads: Hindu Scriptures on Asceticism and Renunciation, 68-9.
Heesterman, Anfragen und Gesprchbeitrge, 321-3.
Malamoud, Cooking the World. Ritual and Thought in Ancient India, 47.
White, The Alchemical Body. Siddha Traditions in Medieval India, 281.
Olivelle, Sanysa Upaniads: Hindu Scriptures on Asceticism and Renunciation, 71, 69.
Collins, Selfless Persons. Imagery and Thought in Theravda Buddhism, 57.

190

(Dgha Nikya 5) gives a hierarchy of sacrifices, the hightest sacrifices being the way of life of
the Buddhist monk and final emancipation.963
Tantric Buddhists perform a fire offering (Tib. sbyin-bsregs) that is patterned after Hindu
fire sacrifices (homa, agnihotra, or yaja). Hindu fire sacrifices include a complex ritual of
Vedic derivation, which retains a vital role in Brhmaic Hindu worship, as well as interiozed
yogic and meditative versions of the sacrifice. According to the Bhadrayaka Upaniad,
sexual union also constitutes a fire sacrifice. The inner fire offering is an advanced yogic
practice that a woman and man perform together while engaged in yogic union. The inner fire
offering is a specific visualization for combining the bliss generated by passionate union with
meditation upon emptiness. In this process, ordinary consensus reality is first sacrificed. Next
the yogi and yogini themselves enter into the sacrifice. At the place where the tips of the sexual
organs touch, or kiss in Tantric metaphor, the drops of sexual fluid that have gathered there
mix and intermingle, creating the ultimate libation. Details sufficient to perform the practice
cannot be found in a text, but in its general outline the drops of sexual fluid intermingle and
melt, inaugurating each partners successful gathering of the inner winds into the central
psychic channel (avadht). In the Buddhist understanding, the fire sacrifice means subjecting
all pheonomena and experiences to the realization of emptiness. On the yogic dimension, the
philosophical principle of emptiness is conflated with the central channel of the body and the
inner fire. As Tsongkhapa states, the burning of conceptual thought is the true meaning of the
fire offering in other words, dissolution into clear light. After the universe is offered into the
inner fire and dissolved, the world-renouncing yogini and yogi re-envision the maala, but this
time in a subtler state of mind.964

1.2. Interiorization of Sacrifice: Achievement and Failure

The institution of world renunciation is often thought to be emerged as a protest against
brahminical orthodoxy. But world renunciaition, as Heesterman maintains, seems rather to have
fitted themselves into the orthogenetic, internal development of Vedic thought.965 Worldrenouncer turns violence against himself, since he has placed his sacrificial fires within himself,
and so internalized his rites.966 World renunciation constitutes the ritual and therefore the civil

963

Heesterman, The Inner Conflict of Tradition. Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society, 42.
Shaw, Passionate Enlightenment. Women in Tantric Buddhism, 163-6.
965
J. C. Heesterman, The Inncer Conflict of Tradition. Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1985), 39-40.
966
Malamoud, Cooking the World: Ritual and Thought in Ancient India, 83, footnote 53.
964

191

death of the renouncer.967 The world-renouncer dies to society. He has no longer a social status.
His funeral rites are already performed. The renouncer, being outside caste rules, is an object of
awe as holy, but is also impure, so far as normal social contact is concerned. The renouncer
whose whole life is a sacrifice is permanently outside society, never returning to the human
world from the sacred sphere of chaotic forest into which his renunciation has put him.968
The victim comes from outside the community, from the realm of the undifferentiated
sacred. He is too foreign to be immediately eligible as a proper sacrificial offering. If he is to
become a true representative of the original victim he must first establish some sort of
relationship with the group and be made to appear like an insider without, however,
surrendering that sacred exteriority that remains his essential characteristic. Through the
process of sacrificial preparation the victim acquires a sufficient resemblance to the natural,
direct target of violence that is, the other members of the community to ensure the
transference of their aggressions and to make him an attractive sacrificial object. At the same
time, he remains sufficiently foreign for his death not to risk plunging the community into a
cycle of revenge.969
Girard became interested in Hindu mythology, and gave a couple of lectures on a mimetic
reading of Hindu mythology. Girard cites a book by J. C. Heesterman, entitled The Inner
Conflict of Tradition, which studies the violent roots of even the least violent Hindu rituals.
This book, for Girard, deals with the violent nature of ritual and archaic religions in a fashion
that brings it very close in some respects to the mimetic theory.970 For Heesterman, Girards
motif is even more totalistic. Girard sees in the sacrifice of the victim as a scapegoat for
societys pent-up violence the starting point of the whole cultural and social order. Faced with
these closely argued and consequential studies, which in Girards case even purports to a total
anthropology of civilization, it is, for Heesterman, hard to dismiss summarily the concept of
sacrifice as a product of yesterdays schoarly imagination.

971

Girards mimetic theory does not exclude the possibility that a given society or religious
group could reach a form of radical awareness of the violent nature of human beings. For Girard,
Jainism probably reached that stage of awareness and proposed a form of radical antisacrificial asceticism, which is compatible with a Christian understanding. However, for Girard,
in Jainism there is a system of extensive worshipping of all sorts of deities, which present
residual sacrificial elements. Although non-violent in nature, Jainism has eventually relapsed
into a patriarchal caste system of Hindu Brahmanical heritage which is so widespread in India
and which still represents a form of exclusion, of symbolic and actual outcasting. This is, for
967

Patrick Olivelle, The rama System. The History and Hermeneutics of a Religious Institution (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1993), 207.
968
Collins, Selfless Persons. Imagery and Thought in Theravda Buddhism, 63.
969
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 277.
970
Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 43-4.
971
Heesterman, The Broken World of Sacrifice: An Essay in Ancient Indian Ritual, 8.

192

Girard, structural violence, i.e. radical injustice. Hindu and Buddhist cultures are, according
to Girard, fully aware, from a normative standpoint, of the injustice of violence and he fully
acknowledge that the Easter traditions have contributed in making those societies less violent.
For Girard, they know that the human being should withdraw from anger, resentment, envy,
violence, but they are not fully aware of the scapegoat mechanism. They know what sacrifice
is, and they progressively tried to forbid it. The difference that Girard see between them and
Christianity is that the latter was able to formulate in the Gospels and unmask in a full light the
anthropological mechanism of mimetic scapegoating and sacrifice.972
We should consider their achievement as well as their failure of ritualism in handling the
violent game of sacrifice.973 Vedic texts evince an all but obsessive anxiety about the ritual
mistake. The ritual mistake can be shown to derive from the violence and killing involved in the
original sacrifice but now excluded from the enclosure. The place that the disturbing
uncertainty has and the ambivalence of the outcome that once were of the essence of sacrifice
are now taken up by the obsessive concern for the rituals perfect static order.974 Aim was to
control sacrifice, not to replace it. What was ruled out the sacred was frenzy of the warrior. The
aim was strict control over sacrifice, not its total rejection.975
The essence of ritualism, according to Heesterman, is that man, kindling the fire in his inner
self, must act out in himself the sacrificial contest of life and death, being, like Prajpati, his
own opponent, Death.976 It should also be taken into consideration that interiorization meant the
real fusion into one person of patron and officiant.977 This enables him to integrate the
sacrificial panoply of Death into his own and so put his rival out of commission as an
independent sacrificial agent.978 Ritualism has turned the ambivalence of the sacrificial contest
into a contradiction.979 They had solved the problem of sacrifice at the price of creating
another but even more intractable problem.980 Uncertainty and catastrophe were replaced by
the fail-safe certainity of ritualism. But the price of excluding uncertainty, for Heesterman,
was internal contradiction. The agnihotra illustrates how the elimination of conflict and
catastrophe resulted in the internal contradiction of Vedic ritualism.981
In spite of the achievement through the interiozation of sacrifice, we should not overlook the
fact that, as Girard argues, Hinduism and Buddhism are not fully aware of the scapegoat
mechanism. There are testimonies about religiously motivated self-sacrifice such as those about
972
973
974
975
976
977
978
979
980
981

Girard, Evolution and Conversion, 212-4.

Heesterman, The Broken World of Sacrifice: An Essay in Ancient Indian Ritual, 44.
Ibid., 81.
Ibid., 63, 83.
Ibid., 140.
Heesterman, The Inncer Conflict of Tradition. Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society, 42.
Heesterman, The Broken World of Sacrifice: An Essay in Ancient Indian Ritual, 3.
Heesterman, The Broken World of Sacrifice: An Essay in Ancient Indian Ritual, 71.
Ibid., 68.
Heesterman, The Inncer Conflict of Tradition. Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society, 91.

193

self-burning by Budhist monks or the well-known self-imposed death of Jain renouncers. In the
same vein we also find a mobile sacrifice (ytsattra) that ends with the sacrificer taking the final
bath in the river Yamun. There he disappears from among men, suggesting ritual suicide by
drowning. The (sacrificial) contest in which he must seek to attain his ultimate aim may turn
against him.982
In world-renouncers search, the emphasis was on the mental sacrifice, or the sacrifice of
the self (tmayaja) already in the Brhmaas extolled as superior to sacrifice to the gods.
The focus of religious life for the (world-renouncing) specialist (of the sacred) is placed not
on external ritual performances but on inner experience interpreted in the light of concepts and
values derived from previous sacrificial speculation.983 This mental sacrifice also could be
understood in relation to the mental renunciation, which entails giving up the ego, desires,
conditioned attitudes and structures of perception. It essentially comprises the giving up of
the ordinary conceptual way of seeing the world and results in the break up of the conditioned
mind and release from bondage.984
In his article A Ritual of Mahyna Vinaya: Self-Sacrifice, Ku has dealt with the worldrenouncers ritual suicide. World-renouncer has to offer his fortune, country, children, wife and
even ones life when making offerings for the purpose of dharmaraka. World-renouncer has to
perform an absolute offering or sacrifice if necessary. Many instances of the bodhisattvas
self-sacrifice are described as the ideal performance of making offerings. The Sarvstivdins
regarded suicide as a religious discipline, and stated the idea in their work, the Stra Spoken by
the Buddha on the Girl Ngadatta. In this text it is said that the girl Ngadatta, in order to attain
Buddhahood, performs a religious suicide while practicing dharmaraka. Before she jumps
from a high building to commit suicide, she says to herself that she will offer her body to the
Buddha like offering him flowers.985
Ngadattas practice of self-sacrifice is therefore considered a religious discipline, by which
she shows her determination to attain Buddhahood. The text says that it is only after having
undergone such a discipline that she is able to change her sex in the next life. 986 The
bodhisattvas story of cutting himself up to feed the hungry tigress is mentioned very often in
vaipulya stras. There were three types of self-sacrifice performed by the bodhisattva. These
are jumping from a cliff, self-immolation, and cutting oneself into pieces. In the text, these
practices of self-sacrifice are said to be for the purpose of enlightening sentient beings to realize
Buddhahood. After the Chinese had adopted the practice of self-sacrifice as a ritual of the
Mahyna, they were particularly in favor of the practice of self-immolation.987
982
983
984
985
986
987

Heesterman, The Broken World of Sacrifice: An Essay in Ancient Indian Ritual, 175.
Collins, Selfless Persons. Imagery and Thought in Theravda Buddhism, 60.
Hartsuiker, Sdhus. Holy Men of India, 117.
The Stra Spoken by the Buddha on the Girl Ngadatta, T. 558, 910a.
The Stra Spoken by the Buddha on the Girl Ngadatta, 909-10.
Ku, A Ritual of Mahayana Vinaya:Self-Sacrifice, 166-8.

194

Self-immolation is mentioned in the Saddharma-puarka, where it is extolled as the best

form of making offerings. Self-immolation is mentioned in the Saddharma-puarka, where it
is extolled as the best form of making offerings. The practice is expalined thus: In the practice
of making offerings to the Buddha Sun-and-Moon-Glow, the Bodhisattva whom-every-sentientbeing-enjoyos-to-see told himself that the most thorough practice of making offerings is an
offering of ones body. After Bodhisattva whom-every-sentient-being-enjoys-to-see decided to
perform the utmost ritual of making offerings, he purified himself with all kinds of perfumes,
and drank perfumed oil for 1200 years. Finally, in front of the Buddha Sun-and-Moon-Glow, he
wrapped himself with heavenly clothing soaked with all kinds of perfumed oil, and by his
magical power, burned himself. The Chinese must have been very much inspired by this story.
Many monks performed the ritual of self-immolation as a way of making offerings. The selfimmolation of six monks is recorded, showing the practice was an important cultural
phenomenon of the period. One common feature of the self-sacrifice on the part of the six
monks was that they were all reciting the section of the Saddharma-pudarka-stra which
describes the immolation of the Bodhisattva whom-every-sentient-being-enjoys-to-see until
they died. The early Chinese practitioners of the ritual of self-sacrifice had viewed the ritual as
being an observance of Mahyna vinaya, and due to this belief, monks performed the ritual
without any regret. The practitioners of the ritual never thought that the ritual violated any rules
that they had to observe in the practice of bodhisattvacary in the Mahyna tradition. The
ritual of self-sacrifice had in fact spread to places where the Mahyna teaching was prevalent.
Thus, many Vietnamese monks performed the ritual of self-immolation during the Vietnam War
in the 1960s. The practice of self-sacrifice is a dna (offering) of nirma-kya (the physical
body).988
A new development sets in that leads straight to the world-renouncer, the sanysin who
leaves the world no longer temporarily, as the rauta sacrificer does, but permanently. He is the
ultimate sacrificer. Like Prajpati, the epitome of classical ritualism, world-renouncer
assimilates Death. For Death becomes his self. The sacrificial contest is now with the
enemy within, ones own self. 989

1.3. A Living Lamp: Buddhist Self-immolation through Fire

The fire of the Vedic sacrifices burns inside the world-renouncer and it is there that the real
sacrifices are performed. The ascetic, sanysin, is one who takes the sacred fire from the

988
989

Ibid., 166-8.
Heesterman, The Broken World of Sacrifice: An Essay in Ancient Indian Ritual, 82.

195

hearth and places it within himself.990 Passing through a state of death is most especially
effected through the meditation of fire here, the inner fire in which the renouncer has
immolated his mundane body once he has laid together his sacrificial fires.991 In this context
of internalization of sacrifice, the self-immolation through fire can be comprehended. The
vogue of self-immolations through fire has been well studied in the Indian and Chinese
contexts.992
With mixed feelings toward the work of Girard, Orzech has rightly analyzed an
internalization of the process of victimage in many Buddhist self-immolation: As a historian
of religions and a specialist in Buddhism and Chinese religions, I have mixed feelings toward
the work of Ren Girard. On the one hand it is refreshing to find such bold, comprehensive, and
yet nuanced theoretical work after so long a period in which such undertakings were out of
fashion. Indeed, Girards work presents the most comprehensive overview of religion and
culture since the work of Durkheim, Freud, and Marx, those giants whom emulates and
opposes.

993

While Buddhism rejected the practice of Vedic sacrifice employing animal

substitutes, it nonetheless, for Orzech, adopted the underlying logic of the sacrifice. The
sacrificial and violent model of Buddhist behavior originates in the Vedic tradition of fire
sacrifice. The self-immolations in Vietnam reenacted earlier Buddhist models, which in turn
were based on a reworking of the Vedic Indian sacrifice. This sacrificial mythic and ritual
structure have, according to Orzech, persisted for 3000 years.994
From a Girardian point of view, Orzech argues that Vietnamese and Westerners became part
of a human sacrificie, part of the crowd polarized around a scapegoat. Finally, in death
Quang-Duc followed the pattern set in the Lotus Stra. He entered meditation and chanted
scripture while performing the self-sacrifice. After death he was virtually divinized, and his
relics were enshrined in the Pagoda. His charred heart was placed on display along with pictures
of him, relics to which other monks and nuns would give the sacrifice. 995 Saddharmapundarka-stra (The Lotus Stra) describes a bodhisattva as engaging in the highest forms of
self-sacrifice in front of Buddhas as well as stpas containing relics of the Buddha. In a previous
existence, the bodhisattva Medicine King wrapped himself in jewels and burnt his body in
offering to the Buddha Pure and Bright Virtue of Sun and Moon. kyamuni Buddha praises
this as the greatest of gifts.996
The sacrifices of hare, Sarvasattvapriyadarsana, or the Chinese monks, like the Vedic
prototype, are performed by fire (Agni) before an assembled commmunity (the gods, Buddha or
990

Brekke, Contradiction and the Merit of Giving in Indian Religions, 304.

White, The Alchemical Body. Siddha Traditions in Medieval India, 282.
992
Faure, Visions of Power. Imagining Medieval Japanese Buddhism, 206.
993
Charles D. Orzech, Provoked Suicide and the Victims Behavior, in Curing Violence: Essays on Ren Girard,
ed. Mark I. Wallace und Theophus H. Smith (California: Polebridge Press, 1994), 139.
994
Ibid., 144-5, 152, 156.
995
Ibid., 157.
996
Ruppert, Jewel in the Asches. Buddha Relics and Power in Early Medieval Japan, 26-7.
991

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assembled Buddhas, the populous) and before a shrine (altar, stpa or pagoda) which
symbolically represents the hoped for order and the body of the divinity (Agni/Prajapati or the
Buddha). In the Buddhist case the identity between the stpa and the body is underscored by the
Buddha relics it enshrines. The stpa is the equivalent of the Vedic fire altar, and like the Vedic
altar, the Buddhist stpa is considered to be a model of the universe.997
Inspired by Girard, Orzech sees scapegoat in mythological stories about Buddhist
Bodhisattvas. Sadparibhta is surrounded by persecutors and finally dies at their hands, yet for
Orzech, the tale makes it clear that he is a scapegoat, an innocent victim. Certainly Girardian
theory, Orzech argues, alters us to the possible presence here of persecution stereotypes. As in
the myths and performances of the Vedic Sacrifice or in the practice of Suttee, Orzech sees a
community form a circle in the process of immolating an individual, an individual who then is
divinized as a savior of community. The fact that the act might be voluntary in Girards view
only underscores the powerful cultural logic of sacrifice and the ability to conceal its true
persecutory nature. Orzech maintains that the performer of a particular type of Buddhist selfimmolation (hare, Sarvasattyapriyadarsana, or Ta-Chih) is analogous to the Vedic sacrificer with
the only key difference: in the Vedic sacrifice substitute are used while in these Buddhist
sacrifices there is no substitution. Orzech has rightly pointed out that the sacrificial and
violent model of Buddhist behavior predates Buddhism, originating in the Vedic tradition of
fire sacrifice which Buddhism, to some extent, emerged to protest. The sacrificial model of
Buddhist behaviour is directly traceable to pre-Buddhist Vedic sacrifices.998
Faure999 also deals with the vogue of self-immolations through fire that has been well
studied in the Indian and Chinese contexts. A monk named sh who, imitating the Bodhisattva
of the Lotus Sutra, burned himself on a pryre near the Nachi waterfall after having followed a
diet of abstaining from cereals. At the moment he set fire to the pyre, in the presence of many
spectators. Lotus Stra was primary vehicle of self-immolation paradigms in East and Southeast
Asia.1000 For twelve hundred years bodhisattva drank oils and fragrent ungents and then dressed
in jeweled garments, and, with the force of his vow ignited his own anointed body. Within them
the Buddhas all at once praised him, saying Excellent ! Excellent ! Good man, this is true
perseverance in vigor ! This is called a true Dharma offering to the Thus Come One (the
Buddha).1001
Here, the Bodhisattva especially cultivates the perfection of forbearance and is especially
concerned with promoting the welfare of others. The chapter on Bhaijya-rja served for some
as justification for actual suicide or for the offering of fingers to the Buddha. It is, according to

997

Orzech, Provoked Suicide and the Victims Behavior, 155.

Ibid., 155, 144-5.
999
Faure, Visions of Power. Imagining Medieval Japanese Buddhism, 206.
1000
Orzech, Provoked Suicide and the Victims Behavior, 149.
1001
Ibid., 150.
998

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Birnbaum1002 likely that the practice of burning incense on th freshly shaven scalps of Chinese
Buddhist monks, as part of their initiation into the Order, stems from beliefs arising out this
chapter. In another account, the Bodhisattva Kemadatta burns his hand as an offering at a site
where millions of people have placed lamps of worship offerings. The brilliant, fiery blaze of
his offering, according to the text, made the millions of lamps seem faint by comparison.
Though the others gave sincere offerings of objects lamps as devotions, Kemadatta
sincerely offered himself: he literally became a living lamp.

1003

Before the 84,000 stpas, a world-renuncing Bodhisattva burned his forearm, making this
his offering for seventy-two thousand years, thus enabling countless beings to reach total
enlightenment. This mythological Bodhisattvas self-immolation by fire is the basis for common
initiatory practices in East Asian Buddhism during which incense cones are allowed to burn
down to the skin or in which fingers are burned. The basis of this story is that all the offering in
the world do not match the merit of offering of the body, because such an offering significes
total selflessness.1004 Thus, the sacrificial nature of world-renouncers self-immolation
(Opfercharakter der Selbstverbrennung) should not be overlooked.1005
Lotus Stra played the important role in shaping conceptions of Buddhist self-immolation.
The auto-cremation of the Medicine King Bodhisattva and his subsequent sacrifice of his arms
provided the primary scriptural inspiration and authority for the practice, and the image of the
Bodhisattva Medicine King reappears frequently in biographies of self-immolators.1006 Benn
focuses on the ways in which the mythological and heroic ideals of the bodhisattva present in
scriptural materials such as the Lotus Sutra played out in the realm of Buddhist practice. The
"Medicine King" (twenty-third) chapter of Lotus Sutra describes the austerities he performed in
a previous lifetime as a bodhisattva named Gladly Seen by All Living Beings. In order to offer
his own body, after steeping himself in scents and fragrances for twelve hundred years, he
anointed his body with fragrant oil and set himself ablaze in the presence of the Buddha. This
Bodhisattva used his body as an offering to the Buddha. He drank a lot of fragrant oil, wrapped
his body in oil-soaked cotton, lit it on fire, and sat there like a human candle as an offering to
the Buddha. He burned his own body like a sacrificial candle (Opferkerze). 1007
His body burned for twelve hundred years, and after it was consumed, he was reborn in the
land of Sun Moon Pure Bright Virtue Buddha, whom he found at the point of entering nirvana.
1002

Birnbaum, The Healing Buddha, 33.

Ibid., 32.
1004
Orzech, Provoked Suicide and the Victims Behavior, 150-51.
1005
Kleine, Sterben fr den Buddha, Sterben wie der Buddha. Zu Praxis und Begrndung ritueller Suizide im
ostasiatischen Buddhismus, 12-3.
1006
James A. Benn, Burning for the Buddha: Self-Immolation in Chinese Buddhism (Kuroda Institute Studies in East
Asian Buddhism 19) (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2007).
1003

By. . University of Hawai'i Press, 2007.

1007
Kleine, Sterben fr den Buddha, Sterben wie der Buddha. Zu Praxis und Begrndung ritueller Suizide im
ostasiatischen Buddhismus, 21 ; Von Brck, Einfhrung in den Buddhismus, 290.

198

Nirvana simply means blowing out, as blowing out a candle. When at death nirvana is
experienced, all karmic forces that sustain existence are dissipated, and the world-renouncing
arahant is released from rebirth. The image that is frequently associated with final nirvana is a
candle, the flame of which has gone out because the fuel and the oxygen have been exhausted.
Kleine has analyzed the widespread and well documented phenomena of ritual suicides,
self-mutilation and "abandoning the body" (self-immolation) in the history of East Asian
Buddhism. Kleine has interpreted many religious suicide and self-immolation in Buddhist
history as a kind of disguised human sacrifice (verkappte Menschenopfer).1008 Triplett also,
citing Girard, has analyzed the nexus between human sacrifice and self-sacrifice.1009 Benn
looks at the early medieval biographies of self-immolators in the Biographies of Eminent Monks
(Gaoseng zhuan) compiled by the monk Huijiao in the first half of the sixth century. Autocremations were often public events, as lay Buddhists sought to gain merit through their
association with self-immolating Buddhist monks. Benn notes the growing importance of relics,
instances of Chan masters cremating themselves, and how self-immolators became revered and
sacralized figures within their locality.
In fact, burning the body is one of the most obvious and commonplace features of Sinitic
Buddhism, since all Chinese and Korean monks and nuns are burned at ordination, or at least
were until recently. Benn investigates the recommendation of burning the body (shao shen) in
two apocryphal texts that were known and extremely influential in the Chinese Buddhist
tradition self-immolation. The term shao shen, while it may in some contexts indicate cremation
of the corpse most notably, of course, that of the Buddha himself also covers a range of
practices applied to the living bodies of Buddhist monks and nuns in East Asia. These practices
extend from the least common and most spectacular autocremation of the living body,
through the burning off or branding of limbs (usually the arms) and the burning off of fingers
to the most common practice, the burning of incense or moxa (i.e., Artemisia tinder) on the
body (the crown of the head or the forearm) at ordination. Lotus Sutra was by far the most
common legitimating text for this type of ritual suicide. Heroic autocremation as an offering
to the buddhas is extolled in this and other texts of Indian origin and endorsed in Chinese
commentaries on them. Burning incense on the body is equivalent to burning the body and is
symbolic of the ascetic practices of the bodhisattva.1010
In this context, the paradox of radical discontinuity and contunity between Christs death
and resurrrection and death/sacralization of numerous Buddhas and Bodhisattvas could be

1008

Kleine, Sterben fr den Buddha, Sterben wie der Buddha. Zu Praxis und Begrndung ritueller Suizide im
ostasiatischen Buddhismus, 34-39 ; See also Von Brck, Einfhrung in den Buddhismus, 287-92.
1009
Katja Triplett. Menschenopfer und Selbstopfer in den japanischen Legenden: Das Frankfurter Manuskript der
Matsura Sayohime-Legende (Religise Gegenwart Asiens/ Studies in Modern Asian Religions Vol. 2) (Mnster: LITVerlag, 2004), 20.
1010
James A. Benn, Where Text Meets Flesch: Burning the Body as an Apocryphal practice in Chinese Buddhism,
in History of Religions. 37/4 (1998), 295-301.

199

explained by the mimetic theory. Girard speaks of the paradox of the resemblance between
mythical and Christian reconciliation. The Resurrrection and the Christian divinization of Jesus ,
Girard argues, correspond exactly, at the structural level, to the mythic divinization of victims
whose falsity the Gospels reveal. But Resurrection of Christ owes nothing to human violence,
by contrast to mythic resurrections, which really stem from collective murders. The resurrection
of Christ comes about after his death, inevitably but not immediately; it happens only on the
third day. God himself accepts the role of the victim of the crowd so that he can save us all.
Against the mythic deities stands a God who does not emerge from the misunderstanding
regarding victims but who voluntarily assumes the role of the single victim. Far from relapsing
into the divinization of victims and the victimization of the divine that characterizes
mythology, according to Girard, the divinity of Jesus obliges us to distinguish two types of
transcendence externally similar but radically opposed.1011
Unlike in the case of Christ, Buddhas relics was immediately sacralized. Almost
immediately they become the object of a dispute among various North Indian monarchs, each
of whom wanted all the physical remains of the Buddha for his own kingdom.1012

2. Nonduality as Violent Undifferentiation

Buddhist radical renouncer as specialist of the sacred and representative of Dionysian
reversal of value can be considered to represent violent undifferentiation (Lindiffrenciation
violente/lidentit des antagonistes) in his initiatory process of world-renouncing and bodyrenouncing yogic meditation. According to Eliade, one realizes the state of sahaja by
transcending the dualities.1013 By undifferentiating the dualities, world-renouncer seems to
represent the state of sahaja that means twinness.1014 For Girard, twins are the symbol of
undifferentiation. The concepts of advaya (nonduality) and yuganaddha (principle of union)
have an important place in tantric metaphysics. In this dialectic of opposites representing
Girardian undifferentiation, we recognize the favorite theme of the Mdhyamikas and, in
general, of the Mahynist philosophers. The tantrist is concerned with sdhana; he wants to
represent the paradox expressed in all the images and formulas concerning the union of
opposites. The Buddhist texts had made two pairs of opposites especially popular praj,
wisdom, and upya, the means to attain it; nya, the void, and karuna, compassion. To unify
1011

Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 125-32.

John S. Strong, Relics, in The Encyclopedia of Religion, ed. Mircea Eliade (New York: Macmillan, 1987),
280-281.
1013
Mircea Eliade, Yoga, Immortality and Freedom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 269.
1014
Schumann, Buddhismus. Stifer, Schulen und Systeme, 196.
1012

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or transcend them was, in sum, to attain the paradoxical position of a Bodhisattva in his
wisdom, the Bodhisattva no longer sees persons (for, metaphisically, the person does not
exist; all that exists is an aggregation of the five skandhas).1015
Dionysian dialects of opposites to unify or transcend, in Girardian thought, to
undifferentiate two pairs of opposites could be understood from the viewpoint of scapegoat
mechanism around Bodhisattva in the paradoxical position who represents the Dionysian
undifferentiation and festive reversal of values. In this Buddhist (ant-ilogical ) Logos we can
find something analogical to the Heraclitean Logos that brings together entities that are
opposites, but with violence. Heidegger is, for Girard, much more interesting when he defines
the Greek Logos. For Girard, Heideggers essential contribution does not lie in an insistence on
the notions of bringing together and reassembling, which he shows to be present in the term
Logos. He also states something much more important: the Logos brings together entities that
are opposites, and it does not do so without violence. Heidegger, Girard argues, recognizes that
the Greek Logos is inseparably linked with violence. Heidegger defines the Heraclitean Logos
as the violence of the sacred, which keeps doubles in relative harmony and prevents them from
destroying one another. Girard maintains that the revelation of the scapegoat principle must be
included in the very definition of the Logos.1016
Tantrism multiplies the pairs of opposites (sun and moon, iva and akti, i and pigal,
etc.), and attempts to unify them through techniques combining subtle physiology with
meditation. This conjunction of opposites represents a transcending of the phenomenal world,
abolishment of all experience of duality.1017 Identity of opposites in Buddhist logic is related
to the violent clash of opposites.1018 Seen in the light of mimetic theory, this Buddhist violent
conjunction of differential opposites represents a transgressing of the phenomenal
differentiation, violent effacement of differences (Leffacement des differences). These images
employed suggest, for Eliade, return to a primordial state of nondifferentiation; unification of
sun and moon represents destruction of the cosmos, and hence return to the original
Unity.1019 This (romantic) return to a primordial state of nondifferentiation can be interpreted
as ritual simulation of original undifferentiation (lindiffrenciation originelle). 1020 Violent
unification and undifferentiation of sun and moon that are ritually simulated by the worldrenouncing yogi in his cosmicized body represents sacrificial destruction of the cosmos.
Thus Buddhist logic of nonduality cannot be fully understood from the viewpoint of purely
formalistic or structuralist reading. This ritual logic of violently undifferentiating nonduality
1015

Eliade, Yoga, Immortality and Freedom, 269.

Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 265-6.
1017
Eliade, Yoga, Immortality and Freedom, 269.
1018
Moacanin, Archetypische Symbole und tantrische Geheimlehren. Der tibetische Buddhismus im Licht der
Psychologie C. G. Jungs. stliche und westliche Wege zum Herzen, 95.
1019
Eliade, Yoga, Immortality and Freedom, 270.
1020
Domenica Mazz, Introduction, in Politiques de Can. En dialogue avec Ren Girard (Paris :Descle de
Brouwer, 2004), 11.
1016

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must be comprehended (social) anthropologically, namely in terms of world-renouncers logic

and dharma. Nonduality means world-renouncing yogins experience. The yogins inner
experience of nonduality is expressed in terms of the highest point, clearlight, or
yuganaddha the fusion of the pair (emptiness and radiance).1021
For Girard, given his time and place, Aristotle was correct to define Greek tragedy in terms
of its cathartic qualities. But in choosing Aristotle as their mentor the formalistic literary
critics could not have done better, for Aristotle views tragedy solely from the perspective of
order. Plato, by contrast, is closer in time and spirit to the crisis. It is not the stately affirmation
of great cultural rites that he discerns in Oedipus the King, but rather the undermining of
differences. Platos attention, Girard claims, is caught by tragic reciprocity, by those very
aspects that are always eliminated by a formalistic or structuralist reading of the Greek
drama.1022 Through the social anthropological re-reading of Buddhist paradoxical logics, we
can find the traces of generative violence.
Tantric sdhana makes use of archaic cosmophysiology. In these disciplines sensory
activities were magnified in staggering proportions as the result of countless identifications and
multilayered homologization of organs and physiological functions with cosmic regions, stars
and planets, gods, etc. Haha Yoga and tantra, for Eliade, transubstantiated the body by giving
it macraanthropic dimensions and assimilating it to the various mystical bodies. As a result of
the yogic experience, the physical body becomes cosmicized. 1023 Haha yoga, literally
meaning yoga of violence, of world-renouncing yogin seems to represent violent
undifferentiation and conjunction. Haha means violence, violent effort. The meaning of the
word Haha is explained in the Goraksha Samhit, also quoted in the Hatha Yoga Pradipika
(comment.1,1.) The syllable Ha in Haha yoga represents the sun, and the syllable tha
represents the moon, and the conjunction (yoga) of the sun and moon is therefore Haha yoga.
Haha yoga means violent conjunction.1024
Within the context of interiorization of sacrifice, world-renouncing yogin of Hatha-Yoga in
his meditative initiation represents ritual simulation and reproduction of the lindiffrenciation
violente before his sacrificial death. In Laya-yoga, concentric process of cosmogonic
involution takes place, whereby each effect is merged in its immediately proceeding cause until
all differences are finally merged in the supreme source. The gradual elimination of
differentiation is experienced by the yogin on the sonic level.1025
Thus, Buddhist violently paradoxical logic of nonduality that is generated from ritual
transgression seems to signify the logical confusion and undifferentiation. In my view, antilogical logic of nonduality representing world-renouncing logic of Buddhist specialists of the
1021
1022
1023
1024
1025

English, Vajrayogin : Her Visualizations, Rituals & Forms : A Study of the Cult of Vajrayogin in India, 176.
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 292-3.
Eliade, Yoga, Immortality and Freedom, 236.
Beer, Die Symbole des Tibetischen Buddhismus, 345.
Gupta, Modes of Worship and Meditation, 175, 177.

202

sacred can be considered to signify logical confusion and disorder. Girards fundamental insight
is precisely that pre-sacrificial time is not at all destructured, does not correspond to just any
dissolution of cultural structure of the type that we are familiar with, and still less to an absence
of structure. Quite to the contrary, the pre-cultural and wild disorder possesses it own clearly
defined structure which is paradoxically grounded in absolute symmetry. This mimetic
symmetry, giving rise to disorder and violence, animated with movements of perpetual
imbalancing, is stabilized by the mechanism of scapegoating. The culture which comes into
being through this mechanism will have a structure based upon asymmetry and differences.
Again paradoxically, this asymmetry and these differences constitute what we call cultural order.
Thus it is that order emerges from disorder. There is structuration, a move from one well
determined structure to another through the play of an until now misunderstood
mechanism,that of scapegoating. What we have just said about order and disorder applies
to logic and to confusion. Confusion is structured symmetrically, thus organized as
undifferentiation. As for logic, it is structure as symmetry and difference.1026
The commonest names for i and pigal in both the Hindu and Buddhist tantras are sun
and moon. All of the sdhakas efforts are directed toward unifying the moon and the sun.1027
Tantric sdhana comprises two stages: (1) cosmicization of the world-renouncing yogi and
(2) transcendence of the cosmos that is, its destruction through the unification of
opposities (sun-moon, etc.).1028 Seen from a Girardian point of view, this polyvalent and
complex symbolism of sun-moon union seems to represent violent undifferentiation. In many
myths, sun and moon are twins. They fight constantly and cannot be distinguished one from the
other. The sun moves too close to the earth. 1029 The yogin already participates in
transcendence: he transgresses the strictest of Hindu prohibitions.

1030

The social

anthropological transcendence around yogic world-renouncer can be explained within the

context of scapegoat mechanism, especially of violent, transgressive and undifferetiating crimes
of reconciliatory victims (see violent (the haha in haha yoga) antinomian practice of
tntrikas1031).
World-renouncing yogi is specialized for physioloigical techniques implying a complete
inversion of all psychophysiological processes. The extremely complex system of homologies
has been elaborated around them. The Haha yogins do when they unite the sun and moon. The
yogin brings about inversion of the cosmic process, regression to the undiscriminated state
of the original Totality1032that means undifferentiation in Girardian theory. Yogic techniques
1026

72.

1027
1028
1029
1030
1031
1032

Jean Michel Oughourlian and Guy Lefort, Psychotic Structure and Girards Doubles, in Diacritics 8/1 (1978),
Eliade, Yoga, Immortality and Freedom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 239-40.
Ibid., 244.
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 216.
Eliade, Yoga, Immortality and Freedom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 247.
White, The Alchemical Body. Siddha Traditions in Medieval India, 347-8.
M. Eliade, Yoga, Immortality and Freedom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 270.

203

and effort to transcend the cosmos is preceded by a long process of cosmicizing the body
and the psychomental life. The Klacakra-tantra relates inhalation and exhalation to day and
night, then to the half months, months, years, thus progressively reaching the longest cosmic
cycles. The yogin repeats and, as it were, relives the periodical creations and destructions of the
universe.1033 World-renouncing yogi might be thought of as reproducing sacrificial process
and mimetic cycle in his cosmicized body. For Girard, nimetic cycle produce the mythic
deities. Mimetic cycle contains the three phases of the mythic cycles: crisis, collective violence,
and sacred revelation.1034 Girard has explained the mythic deification of victims by the working
of the mimetic cycle.1035
The exercises of Hatha yoga, in the first place those of rhythmic respiration, refine the
sensory experience and introduce it to planes inaccessible under normal behaviour. Yogic worldrenouncer undergoes a progressive reversal of normal behaviour. The ordinary worldly
condition being characterised by movement, disordered breathing, mental dispersion, etc., the
(world-renouncing) yogi sets himself to reverse it by practising just the opposite: immobility,
controlled breathing, concentration of the psycho-mental flux upon a single point. The aim, of
reversing the natural behaviour, for Eliade, can be seen in the Tantric-yoga practice of erotic
mysticism: the normal sensitivity is progressively abolished; the yogi transforms himself into a
god and his partner into a goddess; the sexual union becomes a ritual and all the normal
physiological reactions are inverted: not only is the seminal emission arrested, but the texts
emphasise the importance of the return of the semen. Once again, all these efforts are directed
to the death of the profane man, and the symbolism of yogi or Tantric initiation continues the
symbolism of the initiatory death and resurrection, even though the aim of yoga is quite other
than that of a primitive mystic or magician.1036
World-renouncer also seems to represent mimetic furor. Several terms in the Indo-European
heroic vocabulary furor, ferg, wut, mnos express precisely this extreme heat and rage.
The Indo-Europeans were familiar with the technique and ideology of magical heat. OdinWotan was the master of the wut, the furor religious. Now the wut, like other terms in the IndoEuropean religious vocabulary (furor, ferg, mnos), signifies and the anger and extreme heat
provoked by an excessive ingestion of sacred power. The warrior becomes heated during his
initiation fight; he produces a heat which is not unreminiscent of the heat produced by the
yogi. The frenzied and ferocious warriors realized precisely the state of sacred fury (wut, menos,
furor) in military initiation. According to Eliade, it was especially in India that ascetic practices
developed to a degree unknown elsewhere and that an extremely complex ideology grew up
around the notion of tapas. One of the most typical yogico-tantric techniques consists precisely
1033

Ibid., 271.
Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 106.
1035
Ibid., 123.
1036
Mircea Eliade, Myths, Dreams and Mysteries. The Encounter Between Contemporary Faiths and Archaic
Realities, translated by Philp Mairet (New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1960), 91-2.
1034

204

in producing inner heat. In order to consecrate himself to perform the soma sacrifice, the
sacrificer must practice tapas and become burning.1037
The meditator in Vipassana-type meditation was told that he would know when his efforts
were successful by feeling physical sensations of prickling movement or glowing heat, even
to a painful degree, in the body as a whole, or in those particular parts upon which he narrowly
concentrated his attention. The specific procedure was to begin with lip-breath awareness and,
when concentration there was complete, to shift its focus to some other part of the body,
preferably the top of the head, and then extend the area of the resulting burning-prickling
sensations to the rest of the body, if he were able. In one context they are considered to be
purificatory. The guru- quite in keeping with the Buddhist tradition of the intimate relation of
body-mind states interpreted the burnings as indications of impurities, stresses, diseaseproducing strain, or perhaps even of evil spirits within the individual. Or better, the burning
sensations are the result of the purificatory force of the meditators concentrated attention
encountering these impurities within himself. Probingly he must bring each hard lump of
impurity, or sore area of tension, into the focus of his meditative concentration and there burn it
up, no matter how painful the sensations become.1038

3.Buddhism, Nietzsche, Heidegger and C.G. Jung

3.1.

Longing for Violent Sacred

For Girard, the ritual visibly reproduce the unanimous, reconciling violence of scapegoat
mechanism. The myths presenting the founding role of the primordial murder are, Girard
contends, so numerous that even a comparative mythologist so little given to generalizations as
Mircea Eliade considered it necessary to take into account. Eliade speaks of a creative murder
(meurtre crateur) common to many stories of origin and founding myths throughout the world.
In keeping with his practice of pure description, Eliade never, for Girard, suggested the
universal explanation of the theme that must be given.1039 There was the struggle between the
human sciences appraoch and the established history and phenomenology of religion
position. Followers of Eliade draw the battle line around the irreducibility of the Sacred.

1037

Eliade, Yoga, Immortality and Freedom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 107-8.
Winston L. King, A Thousand Lives Away. Buddhism in Contemporary Burma (Berkeley: Asian Humanities
Press, 1964), 211-4.
1038

1039

Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 83.

205

Eliade himself generously attempts to interpret the tension that has developed between the
two approaches as a creative dialogue between phenomenologists and historians.1040
In the language of the Ntha Siddhas, yogic technique is defined as reabsorption of the
cosmos through inversion of all the processes of manifestation. It is the reintegration of the
primordial androgyne, the conjunction, in ones own being, of male and female. According to
Eliade, this nostalgia for the primordial completeness and bliss is what animates and informs
all the techniques that lead to the coincidentia oppositorum in ones own being.1041 Yogic
coincidentia oppositorum could be interpreted as violent undifferentiation (lindiffrenciation
violente) and crisis of difference (crise des diffrences). For Girard and Derrida, coincidentia
oppositorum designates a violent paradox rather than a harmonious synthesis.1042
Eliade in his history and phenomenology often focused on arachic spirituality, privileging
an archaic ontology with its nonhistorical, nontemporal, eternal, archetypal structures of
meaning, and on an antihistorical cosmic religiosity that are detached from their historical and
cultural contexts. Eliade has often been criticized as an uncritical champion of primitive,
arachic, or traditional cultures. Close reading of Eliades writings reveal his anti-historical
tendency. Much closer to a tradition of German Romanticism and metaphysical idealism in his
interpretation of meaning, Eliade may be placed within a structural, synchronic, hermeneutical,
and phenomenological tradition
In the more romanatic definitions of Mircea Eliade and other European historians of
religions, Tantra are thought to represent a much needed affirmation of sexuality and bodily
existence, resulting in the neoromantic celebration of Tantric sexual liberation. 1043
Examining the various attempts to sanitize tantra, Urban, with his post-colonialist demolition
of the Western scholarship on Tantrism, look at the revolarized place of Tantra in the work
of twentieth-century historians of religions, such as Mircea Eliade, Heinrich Zimmer, and Julius
Evola. Urban argues that there were often many political and in Evolas case, explicitly fascist
ramifications in their scholarly reconstructions of Tantrism.1044 According to Urban, many of
the greatest European Indologists and scholars of comparative religion, such as Mircea Eliade,
Agehananda Bharati, and even C. G. Jung, were extremely interested in Tantra and in some
cases saw it as the very essence of Eastern spirituality.1045
Zimmer, Evola and Eliade, these three have had a formative impact on the fields of Indology
(in the case of Zimmer), esotericism and righ-wing politics (Evola), and comparative religions
(Eliade). And all three felt a strong attraction to Tantra that they defined as the culmination of
1040

Burton Mack, Introduction: Religion and Ritual, in Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly(ed), Violent Origins. Walter
Burkert, Ren Girard, and Jonathan Z. Smith on Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation (Standford:Stanford
University Press, 1987), 4-5.
1041
Mircea Eliade, Yoga, Immortality and Freedom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 272.
1042
McKenna, Violence and Difference. Girard, Derrida, and Deconstruction, 39.
1043
Urban, Tantra. Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion, 6.
1044
Ibid., 22.
1045
Ibid., 165.

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all Indian thought: the most radical form of spirituality and the archaic heart of aboriginal India.
The most influential modern scholars of religions were preoccupied with the sexy, steamy
world of Tantra. Each of these three, as Urban argues, regarded Tantra as the ideal religion of
this modern age of darkness. They felt an intense sense of dislocation and a longing for an
idyllic traditional past. Still more strikingly, Zimmer, Eliade, and Evola all saw Tantra as the
most transgressive and violent path to the sacred beyond good and evil, in violation of
conventional law.1046
Girardian understanding of modern society as a mimetic crisis helps to throw fresh light on
this neoromantic and neopagan longing for violent sacred. Girard contends that Christianity has
caused the decomposition of the sacrificial order. It deprives modern societies of most of the
capacity of sacrificial violence to contain violence and to establish temporary order.
Contemporary world are increasingly threatened by the resurgence of mimetic crisis on a
planetary scale. Girards mimetic theory helps us to explain the rise of violence in egalitarian
and competitive societies. Whereas traditional societies had anti-mimetic institutions that
maintained social distinctions and so averted the outbreak of mimetic crisis, modern societies
are characterized by the pursuit of equality with the result that the mimetic crisis is constantly
lying in wait, as it were. In Chapter 4 of The Myth of the Eternal Return (entitled "The Terror of
History"), Eliade suggests that the abandonment of mythical thought and the full acceptance of
linear, historical time, with its "terror", is one of the reasons for modern man's anxieties.
This neopagan celebration of archaic and violent sacred can be found also in Nietzsche and
Heidegger. In Nietsche and National Socialism, Girard finds an illusory and dangerous attempt
to go back behind the biblical concern for the victim and to build a sacrificial culture again.1047
Nietzsche has a unique importance for Girard, because he correctly saw the difference of
Christianity from all other world religions. Nietzsche is very important for Girard as a great
philosopher who saw quite clearly the new absolute value that Christianity had injected into
Western culture. He acutely perceived that it was associated with democracy, a political form he
held in contempt. Martin Heidegger, for Girard, tried to expel the Jewish and Christian
revelation from his own thinking and view of culture and the state. We can see this clearly not
only in his writings but also in his commitment to the Nazi party.1048 Heidegger with his
Nietzscheism was, Girard contends, real successor of Nietzsche, the semiofficial interpreter of
his thought in the eyes of the everlasting avant-garde.1049
Nietsche was, for Girard, the first philosopher to understand that the collective violence of
myths and rituals (everything he named Dionysos) is of the same type as the violence of the
Christs Passion. Because it reproduces the founding event of all rituals, the Passion of Christ is
connected with every ritual on the entire planet. The difference between them is not in the facts,
1046
1047
1048
1049

Ibid., 166-7.
Girard, Das Ende der Gewalt. Analyse des Menschheitsverhngnisses, 133.
Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, xxii.
Ibid., 180.

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which are the same in both cases, but in their interpretation. In the Dionysian passion and in the
Passion of Jesus there is the same collective violence.1050 In a piece entitled Dionysus versus
the Crucified, Girard discusses Nietzsches acceptance and even encouragement of
violence.1051 Girard says that in order to create a superior form of humanity and culture,
Nietzsche believed that the human civilization must accept and even induce the worst forms of
violence, which is mediated through what Nietsche came to to call Dionysos.
Myths are based on a unanimous persecution. Judaism and Christianity destroy this
unanimity in order to defend the victims justly condemned. The morality on which the JudeoChristian defence of the innocent victim is based is not slave morality, that is lust for
vengeance of the weak against the strong. It is instead a morality which correlates to the truth
that the victims are indeed innocent. Girard argues that the refusal of Nietzsche to see the true
implications of the Judaeo-Chrisitan concern for victims drove him mad. For Girard, to elude
his own discovery and to defend mythological violence, Nietsche is obliged to justify human
sacrifice, he doesnt hesitate to do so, resorting to horrifying arguments. He raises the stakes
even on the worst social Darwinism. He suggests that to avoid degenerating, societies must get
rid of humans who are waste. Through Christianity, the individual was made so important, so
absolute, that he could no longer be sacrificed: but the species endures only through human
sacrificeGenuine charity demands sacrifice for the good of the species it is hard, it is full of
self-overcoming, because it needs human sacrifice. And this pseudo-humanness called
Christianity wants it established that no one should be sacrificed.

3.2. Buddhist Superman Beyond Good and Evil

Buddhist world-renouncing Superman beyond good and evil could be considered as a
reconcilatory victim. The victim appears to be simultaneously good and evil, peaceable and
violent, a life that brings death and a death that guarantees life.1052 Buddhist sacred superman
from the choatic forest as reconcilatory victim undifferentiates and transgresses the fundamental
moral difference between good and evil. The mythological-heroic Buddhist world-renouncing
Superman (sacred Buddhas, Bodhisattvas and Siddhas) as founding victim are accused of
having violated the the fundamental ethical difference.
For Coomaraswamy, it is true that we find in Nietzsches work a certain violence and
exaggeration: but its very nature, according to him, is that of passionate protest against
unworthy values and snobisme, and the fact that this protest was received with so much
1050

Ibid., 171-2.
Ren Girard, Nietzsche versus the Crucified, The Girard Reader, ed. James G. Williams (New York: The
Crossroad Publishing Company, 1996), 246.
1052
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 102.
1051

208

execration suggests that he may be a true prophet. Of special significance, Coomaraswamy

asserts, is the beautiful doctrine of the Superman- so like the Chinese concept of the Superior
Man, and the Indian Maha Purusha, Bodhisattva and Jivan-mukta. According to him, the
doctrine of the Superman, whose virtue stands beyond good and evil, who is at once the
leader and saviour of men, has been put forward again and again in the worlds history. A host
of names for this ideal occur in Indian literature: he is the Arhat, Buddha, Jina, Tirthakara, the
Bodhisattva, and above all Jivan-mukta (freed in this life), whose actions are no longer good or
bad, but proceed from his freed nature. Nietsche has certainly a contempt for pity. The Will
to Power, Coomaraswamy argues, asserts that our life is not to be swayed by motives of
pleasure or pain, the pairs of opposites, but is to be directed towards its goal, and that goal is
the freedom and spontaneity of the Jivan-mukta. And this is beyond good and evil. This also set
out in the Bhagavad Gita: the hero must be superior to pity (ashocyananvashocastvam);
resolute for the fray, but unattached to the result. The Bodhisattvas do not consider the ethics
of their behaviour: they have attained to spontaneity of action, because their discipline is in
unison with the wisdom and activity of all Tathagatas. When Nietzsche says that the Superman
is the meaning of the earth he, for Coomaraswamy, means what we mean when we speak of a
Bodhisattva, or of a Jivan-mukta. Nietzsche has praised the institutions of caste, for he thought
it right that life should grow colder towards the summit.1053
The victim appears to be simultaneously good and evil.1054 In Buddhist meditativ-yogic
awakened state of Dionysian world-renouncer,, all dualities undifferentiate. World-renouncer
attains sudden awakening at the moment when he receives the ordination with the Vajra Jewel
Precepts. In this awakened state, all dualities, including all distinctions between good and evil,
collapse.1055 The founding victim absorbs all causality. The victim will be responsible for the
cure because he is already responsible for the sickness. This is only a paradox for someone with
a dualistic vision who is too remote from the experience of a victim to feel the unity and is too
determined to differentiate precisely between good and evil.1056
Buddhist heroic and tragic Superman beyond good and evil is the victim undifferentiating
the fundamental difference between good and evil. The radical world-renouncing Superman
criminal and impure marginal Kplika who had transcended both good and evil and are
said to be always remain untainted by them, are the scapegoat Sin-Eater par excellence.
1053

1057

Ananda Coomaraswamy, The Dance of Shiva. Fourteen Indian Essays (New Delhi:Munshiram Manoharlal,
1972), 155-63.
1054
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 102.
1055
William Bodiford, Emptiness and Dust: Zen Dharma Transmission Rituals, pp. 299-307, in: David Gordon
White, (Ed), Tantra in Practice. Princeton Reading in Religions. Princeton University Press. Princeton and Oxford, p.
301.
1056
Girard, The Scapegoat, 43.
1057
Elizabeth Chalier-Visuvalingam, Bhairavas Royal Brahmanicide: The Problem of the Mahbrhma a, in Alf
Hiltebeitel(ed), Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees. Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism (New York:
State University of New York Press, 1989), 169.

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The relation of the victim to the community, as described by Girard, is irreducibly Derrida
would say undecidably active and passive: the community comes out of the victim no less
than the victim comes out of the community. It is transcendent in that the victim is the matrix
of differences and values (life/death, good/bad, and true/false as they depend on being in- or
outside the community), which are in no wise antecedent to the power of attraction and
repulsion emanating from the victim. All structure emanates from the originary relation to the
victim. 1058 Moral dualism between good and evil appears as collective violence against
surrogate victim is eliminated.1059
In the arcana of Tendai Buddhism in Japan, there are Buddhist world-renouncing
teachings that passions are awakening, that good and evil are nondual, that nirva and
sasra are identical, and all dharmas are empty. Thus Buddhist non-duality, for Faure, was
invoked to justify bisexuality. The pun about form(shiki, meaning also sex) was also
frequently implicit in the quotations of the famous passage of the Heart Stra, From is
Emptiness, Emptiness is form, to the point that the term Kya shingy (The Heart Stra of
Kya[san]) came to be used as a euphemism for homosexuality. Despite its more frequent
association with the monks of the Shingon sect, it seems that the phenomenon of transgressive
ritual homosexuality was also quite common in Zen monasteries.1060
For Girard, in fact, ritualized homosexuality is a fairly frequent phenomenon. It takes place
at the paroxysm of the mimetic crisis and can be found in cultures that apparently allot no place
to homsexuality outside the context of these religious rites. Ritualized homosexuality, Girard
argues, must be compared with a certain form of ritualized cannibalism practised in various
cultures, where (as with homosexuality) cannibalism does not exist at ordinary times.1061
Buddhist yogic bermensch from undifferentiated forest represents the transgressive
nonduality of good and evil as founding victim. With the development of Bodhisattva Precepts
and the interiorization of morality, the emphasis in Buddhist repentance is laid on a formless
repentance that aims at realizing the emptiness of sins and delusion rather than on the actual,
phenomenal or formal transgressions.1062
According to Girard, insanely1063 condemning the real greatness of our world, not only
Nietzsche destroys himself, but he suggested the terrible destruction that was later done by
National Socialism. Nietzsche is the author of the only texts capable of clarifying the Nazi
horror, Girard says, despite the mountains of clever but false arguments that some post-war
intellectuals have offered to acquit their favorite thinker of any responsibility in the National

1058

McKenna, Violence and Difference. Girard, Derrida, and Deconstruction, 73-4.

Girard, The Scapegoat, 72.
1060
Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy. A Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism, 254.
1061
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 336.
1062
Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy. A Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism, 237-8.
1063
Girard demotes Nietzsche in spiritual contrast to Wagner and Dostoevsky in Superman in the Underground:
Strategies of Madness Nietzsche, Wagner, and Dostoevsky, MLN 91 (December 1976), 1161-85.
1059

210

Socialist catastrophe. Girard considers these two famous philosophers (Nietzsche and
Heidegger) as thinkers of neopaganism. For Girard , these philosophers condemn the real
greatness of modern world and of Christianity in unveiling and overcoming the scapegoat
mechanism.1064
Traditional socieities that are based on a rigid framework are capable of distributing the
appetites and needs of individuality in divergent directions, thus they ward off the possibility of
an uncontrolled interplay of mimetic effects. For Girard, modern world shows itself to be quite
capable of absorbing high does of undifferentiation. What would have acted as a deadly poison
in other socieites, giving rise to a crescendo of mimetic rivalry, can indeed produce terrifying
convulsions within our own society. But up to now, these have proven to be merely temporary.
Girard maintains that the modern world has not only got over them, but it has drawn from them
new strength to flourish.

1065

3.3.Violent Sacred, Heidegger, Eliade, Evola and Fascism

Heidegger obviously means there to be a difference between the violence of the Greek
Logos and the violence he attributes to the Johannine Logos. For Girard, Heidegger sees the
former as a violence commited by free men, while the second is a violence visited upon slaves.
The Jewish Decalogue is simply an interiorized form of tranny. In this respect, Heidegger, as
Girard argues, is faithful to the whole tradition of German idealism, which represents Yahweh as
an oriental despot as he is faithful to the thought of Nietzsche, who takes this tendency to the
extreme by defining the whole Judaeo-Chrisitian phenomenon as the product of slavish thinking,
devised for the benefits of slaves.1066
Evola was as an unrepentant fascist and Eliade was a complex and conflicted figure
who fled his own fascist history in order to profess an allegeldly apolitical(though perhaps not
untainted) ideal.1067 With its ideal of self-divinization, realizing the gods within ones own body
and imagination, Tantra provides the needed antidote to the life-denying, hyperintellectualized
world of the Judeo-Christian West. Thus, in the final paragraph of The Philosophies of India, we
find Zimmers self-realized, godlike Tantric hero starkly contrasted with the weak, self-effacing,
humble, and all-too-human figure of Job in the Hebrew Bible.1068 We have decoded the process
of self-divinization of godlike Tantric hero through the transgressive crimes in the light of the
scapegoat mechanism. Oedipal crimes of tantric hero must be understood in terms of
mythological accusations that makes the tragic hero an unconscious criminal. Scapegoat
1064
1065
1066
1067
1068

Girard, Wenn all das beginnt. Ein Gesprch mit Michel Treguer, 19.
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 284-5.
Ibid., 266.
Urban, Tantra. Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion, 168.
Ibid., 172.

211

mechanism that produces the transformation of a popular hero into a scapegoat1069 have played
the role in the genesis and organization of Buddhist myths.
Contrast between the Buddhist sacred discourses around godlike and transgressive Tantric
hero and the desacralizing discourses about the all-too-human figure of Job in the Hebrew Bible
may be understood in Girards theory on generative scapegoats of sacred violence. Oedipus, for
Girard, is a successful scapegoat, because he is never recognized as such. Job is a failed
scapegoat. 1070 In this book, I have tried to decode the concealed and hidden scapegoat
mechanism around Buddhist radical and mythological world-renouncer. For Girard, the
hypothesis of victimization allows the texts to emerge from the silence that surrounds them and
frees them from the metaphysical and moral trap that prohibits their interpretation.1071 Girard
criticizes the insipid modern fascination with transgression, the influence of which, even in
the best minds, isolates and accentuates the more absurd aspects of prohibitions.1072
The world-renouncing and festive thematics of Buddhist transgression must be conceived
within the context of sacrificial mechanism. McKenna writes: We are regaled with the
thematics of transgression, of overturning traditional values, and so on, without any recollection
that the carnival played on the margins of Ash Wednesday, that Mardi Gras was a prelude to the
Passion, as Saturnalia was to sacrifice. We can desire to perpetuate the seemingly emancipatory
antivalues of the festival against repressive institutions only if we forget that the very free-play
of its antistructuring proclivities is a sacrificial institution (see Turner, The Ritual Process:
Structure and Anti-Structure). It is only in relatively modern times that such free-play is not the
foreplay to bloodletting.1073
Under the title Riding the Tiger: Julius Evola and the Fascist Uses of Tantra, Urban argues
that Evola reveals the most extreme appropriation of Tantra in the service of a full-blown
ideological stance and political agenda. In his book The Metaphyiscs of Sex (1969), Evola
argues that the fundamental principle of the secret teaching is the transformation of poision into
nectar, of the very forces that have led to mans fall and perdition. Evola- an outspoken fascist
shows the manipulation of Tantra in the service of righ-wing violence.To this day, Evola
remains one of the most enigmatic, poorly understood, and yet influential figures in the
scholarship and politics of modern Europe. As an anti-Christian, pagan fascist, Evola
idealized the martial glory of ancient Rome in opposition to the effete Catholic virtues of
humility and compassion, calling for the birth of an elite spiritual nobility and perhaps even a
secret military brotherhood who could regenerate the decaying world of modern Europe. Today,

1069
1070
1071
1072
1073

Girard, Job. The Victim of his People, 38.

Ibid., 35.
Ibid., 30.
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 42.
McKenna, Violence and Difference. Girard, Derrida, and Deconstruction, 35.

212

Evola is regarded as one of the most influential figures in the various neofascist movements of
Europe.1074
For Evola, is the essence of the Tantric path is to grab the snake by the throat and to
transform his poision into ambrosia, to embrace the forces of violence and lust and transmute
them into forces of freedom and transcendence and to transforme the poison into medicine.1075
Under the title The Destructive Power of the Absolute: Tantra, Heroism, and Violence, Urban
argues that as the most extreme and dangerous path, the Tantric way steps outside the ethical
boundaries that are thought to confine ordinary human beings to the conventional world.
Passing through an intense destruction of human limitations, the tntrika experiences forms
of anomia, beyond good and evil which are so extreme that they make the Western supporters of
the idea of the superhuman look like innocuous amateurs. Because this Kali yuga is the darkest
era, in which exisiting laws have become either oppressive or irrelevant, the true initiate is
often compelled to violate even the most sacred laws in the service of liberation and
empowerment. This, in Evolas reading, is the essence of the Tantric path, the path of the virile
hero who dares to transgress the laws that bind other human beings. To the tntrika, there is no
good or evil, for he has realized the relativity of all moral precepts.1076
Tantric superhuman might be understood in the sense of the superhuman nature of
reconciliatory victims. The tantric superman in his initiation who is often compelled to violate
and to transgress even the most sacred laws in the service of Buddhist liberation and
empowerment commits the undifferentiating crime of reconciliatory victim. Tantric
transgression as well as royal transgression could be best explained in terms of the victimage
mechanism. Clearly the royal incest, as well as the other forbidden acts, are designed to make
the king the very incarnation of impurity. It is because of this impurity that the king, in the
course of the enthronement and renewal ceremonies, is subjected to the ritualistic insults and
abuse of his people. The sacred king is required to violate the most sacred laws, in particular the
laws of exogamy. A hostile crowd denounces the misconduct of this miscreant, who is as yet
nothing more than a criminal and a social outcast. The real or symbolic sacrifice of the monarch
takes place because punishment of the severest sort seems to be in order, and the needful insults
and hostilities, so Girard maintains, find their outlet in sacrificial ceremonies in which the king
plays the chief role the role of the original victim. And the sacrifice of the king is clearly a
punishment of his transgressions. In Ruanda, the king and the queen mother clearly an
incestuous couple must periodically submit to a sacrificial rite that can only be regarded as a
symbolic punishment for incest. For Girard, each African king is a new Oedipus.1077
For Girard, the religious interpretations attribute the beneficial results of the sacrifice to the
superhuman nature of the victim. Girard has pointed out the full range of the term sacred, or
1074
1075
1076
1077

Urban, Tantra. Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion, 172-4.
Ibid., 175-6.
Ibid., 177.
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 105-6.

213

rather, of the Latin sacer, which is sometimes translated sacred, sometimes accursed, for it
encompasses the maleficient as well as the befeficient. In Africa, as in many other parts of the
world, there is only a single term to denote the two faces of the sacred the interplay of order
and disorder, of difference lost and retrieved, as enacted in the immutable drama of the sacrifice
of the incestuous king. This term, accrodging to Girard, serves to describe all the royal
transgressions, all forbidden as well as all permitted sexual practices, all forms of violence and
brutality.1078
Girard proposes that in all human institutions it is necessary to reproduce a reconciliatory
murder by means of new victims. The original victim is endowed with superhuman, terrifying
prestige because it is seen as the source of all disorder and order. Subsequent victims inherit
some of this prestige. Girard looks to this prestige for the source of all political and religious
sovereignty. It is necessary and sufficient for the victim to take advantage of the lapse of time
before the sacrifice and to transform veneration into real power. One might therefore expect that
the interval between the selection of the victim and the sacrifice will be gradually prolonged.1079
Evolas version of Tantra helped him to rationalize a political agenda of fascism, racism,
and violence. Evolas extremist right-wing politics and interpretation of Tantra have continued
to exert influence among European neofascist movements and certain braches of contemporary
esoterism. As a path of transgression, amorality, and power, Tantra is for Evola and his
followers the most fitting corrective to this dark era.1080 Even his most ardent defenders,
according to Urban, acknowledge that Eliade was a vocal supporter of the most extreme rightwing, ultraconservative, and traditionalist movements in Romania of the 1930s. Eliade
advocated an antimodernist form of traditionalism, rejecting democracy and calling for a
return to the Romanian peasant spirit. However, as Strenski suggests, Eliades early
involvement in the traditionalist movements of the Romanian right wing would provide the
foundation for much of his later scholarship: it profoundly colored his vision of traditional
man, or homo religiosus, his rejection of modern civilization, and his request for primordial
origin beyond the terrifying vicissitudes of history .1081
Unlike Eliade, for Girard, modern Western society can be described in terms of an
exceptionally far-ranging and drawn-out critical cycle. The very essence of modern society
might be said to be its ability to sustain the possibility for new discoveries in the midst of an
ever-worsening sacrificial crisis not, to be sure, without signs of anxiety and stress. There is
room for discovery in the natural sciences, in the field of cultural significations, and finally, on
the specific subject of the arbitrary generative act. The Western world is in a perpetual state of
crisis, and the crisis is always spreading. Girard fully acknowledges the the indubitably real
1078

257.
1079
1080
1081

Ren Girard, Violence and the Sacred (New York/London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005),
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 53.
Urban, Tantra. Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion, 178-9.
Ibid., 180-2.

214

progress of the human sciences with the slow but steady progress of knowledge toward an
understanding of the surrogate victim and of the violent origin of all human culture.1082
So it is that Eliade perhaps the most influential spokesman for the history of religion in
the United States is arguably, for Urban, also the leading anti-historian of religions. As
Strenski suggests, Eliades turn to the ahistorical method of creative imagination was, as
Urban argues, part of his own attempt to deal with the real terrors of history in his past, to flee
the violence of time in the timeless realm of myth. In any discussion of Eliades view of Tantra,
for Urban, we must face the difficult and troubling question of whether Eliades vision was a
kind of crypto-fascism, tainted with the same sorts of repugnant right-wing political interests
as Evolas.

1083

One finds a considerable interest in the archaism of Indian culture among Orientalists and
the Romantic movement of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While Europe and the New
World were undergoing enormous social and political changes, India seemed to have remained
unchanged for thousands of years, representing a crucial example of static archaism with
which the dynamic modernity of the West could be successfully contrasted. There is an
interesting tendency from the late eighteenth century onwards to emphasize the mystical
nature of Hindu religion by reference to the esoteric literature known as Vednta, the end of
the Vedas namely the Upaniads. This call was met most strikingly by the German idealist
Schopenhauer, who remained deeply interested in Vedntic and Buddhist philosophical ideas.
The influence of the works of the Theosophical Society in the early twentieth century have
contributed to perennialization of Vednta.1084
Girard speaks of the great tragedy of our era of internal mediation. Recognizing
imitation and its ambivalence, Girard argues, seems to be the only way of feeling that it is still
possible to go from reciprocity to relationship, from negative contagion to a form of positive
contagion. This is what the imitation of Christ means.1085

3.4. A Crime of Undifferentiation

For Parry,1086 the yogis immobilisation of mind, body, breath and semen represents an
attempt to return to what Eliade describes as a primordial motionless Unity; and to attain
samdhi, a timeless state of non-duality in which there is neither birth nor death nor any
experience of differentiation. I have appealed to Girards idea of violent undifferentiation as a
way of analyzing the world-renouncing yogis attempt to reproduce and to simulate the ritual
1082
1083
1084
1085
1086

Girard, Violene and the Sacred, 237-41.

Urban, Tantra. Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion, 182-86.
King, Orientalism and Religion. Postcolonial theory, India and the Mystic East, 118-20.
Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benot Chantre, 109.
Parry, Sacrificial Death and the Necrophagous Ascetic, 86-7.

215

undifferentiation within the context of initiation. Most of the excesses, cruelties, and aberrations
referred to as tantric orgies must be explained as a ritual simulation of violent
undifferentiation within the context of Buddhist initiation rites. The yogin undertakes this
exercise in order to anticipate the process of reabsorption that occurs at death. Tantric sadhana is
centered on the experience of initiatory death. In this respect the tantrist is a dead man in life,
for he has experienced his own death in advance.1087
Once the bodily microcosm was transformed into the seat of the sacrifice. 1088 The single
sacrificer incorporates alone the whole universe, articulating by himself the cosmic process, like
the prototype Prajpati, who is at the same time sacrificer, victim, and recipient of the sacrifice.
Like his mythic prototype Prajpati, who had in the final contest incorporated in himself his
rival, death, the single sacrificer had internalized his own death. Death is his own
self.

1089

Buddhist nonduality-in-duality (avaitdvaita) seems to represent the violent

undifferentiation in Girardian theory.

The tantric processes took place in a subtle body, which was homologized with both the
cosmos and the pantheon. The initiatee was required to contemplate the dissolution and creation
of the universe and finally to experience in himself the death (=dissolution) and resurrection
or recreation both of the cosmos and of his own subtle body. As we have seen, tantric and
yogic processes seems to represent the mimetic crisis and ritual processes of violent
undifferentiation. Buddhist non-duality may be interpreted as traces of some some crisis of
degree climaxed by its habitual resolution, the collective transfer on a single victim.1090
It might be thought that the festive world-renouncer as victim represents Dionysian crisis of
undifferentiation. Girardian hypothesis means that myth and ritual originate in the scapegoating
process. Many tntrikas, openly indulging in cross-caste adultery, coprophagy, and all manner of
other purity violations and antisocial behavior (or at least openly claiming to do so), were
simply revolting to the general public.1091 The future victim, as Girard asserts, is encouraged to
escape, something that is normally forbidden, or to commit some other transgression that would
make him guilty in the eyes of the community that would make him, in other words, someone
capable of uniting the same crowd in opposition to himself. The infraction the victim is invited
to commit helps to mobilize the crowd against him. The rite prescribes exactly what is required
to arouse hostility towards the victim at the precise instant demanded by the operation of the
scapegoat mechanism.1092

1087

Mircea Eliade, Yoga, Immortality and Freedom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), 271-2.
White, The Alchemical Body. Siddha Traditions in Medieval India, 184.
1089
Heesterman, The Inner Conflict of Tradition. Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society, 50, 221.
1090
Ren Girard, To Double Business Bound: Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology (London: The
Athlone Press, 1988), 147.
1091
White, The Alchemical Body. Siddha Traditions in Medieval India, 7.
1092
Girard, Job. The Victim of his People, 99.
1088

216

Festivals in almost every society involve the deliberate violation of established laws. For
example, celebrations in which sexual promiscuity is not only tolerated but prescribed or in
which incest becomes the required practice. For Girard, such transgressive violation must be
viewed in their broadest context: that of the overall elimination of differences. Family and social
hierarchies are temporarily suppressed or inverted. These festivals commemorate a sacrificial
crisis. World-renouncing specialist of the sacred represents and simulates sacrificial crisis. The
fundamental purpose of the festival is to set the stage for a sacrificial act that marks at once the
climax and the termination of the festivities. Sacrificial origin of festivals must be pointed
out.1093
By embracing death and pollution, by systematically combining opposities, the radical
world-renouncer Aghori aims to suspend time, to get off the roundabout and to enter an eternal
state of samdhi in which death has no menace. 1094 Yogic techniques involve the
commingling of humans, divine, and mineral blood and semen.1095 Yogic commingling also
could be considered to represent a process of undifferentiation or disorder and violent
effacement of distinctions. Girard has observed that most myths and rituals begin with themes
of confusing undifferetiation. God and humans are all mixed up. Day and night are not
differentiated. Since undifferentiation is horrifying to the community, the victim is usually
accused of a crime of undifferentiation. Parricide and incest are the two most common
undifferentiating crimes attributed to victims. One Oedipus is convicted of patricide and incest,
he stands as the unique embodiment of violence and undifferentiation.

4. World-renouncers Logic of Nonduality as Undifferentiation

4.1. Meditative Process of Violent Undifferentiation
Yogins commingled male and female essences, is the result of this yogic process.1096
In a tantric metaphysics that stresses unity-in-difference (bhedbheda), or nonduality-in-duality
(avaitdvaita), there has to be a stress on equipose, equivalence, and equanimity, on the union
or coincidence of polar opposities. In practical terms, the factoring of the two into the one has
been perennially enacted, in tantra, through sexual union between practitioner and consort.
However, every subtle body is intrinsically androgynous, being divided along the vertical axis
between male and female halves after the fashion of Ardhanrvara, the half-female form of
1093

Ren Girard, Violence and the Sacred (New York/London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005),
127-8.
1094
Parry, Sacrificial Death and the Necrophagous Ascetic, 100.
1095
White, The Alchemical Body. Siddha Traditions in Medieval India, 197.
1096
Ibid., 202.

217

iva. 1097 Girards theory can offer an anthropological explication of Buddhist logic of
nonduality as an undifferentiating logic of yogic world-renouncer. This undifferentiating and
undifferentiated world-renouncing logic of nonduality must be understood within the context of
the undifferentiating crimes of victims. There are crimes of undifferentiation present in mythical
accusations. Monsters are usually doubles. The Sphinx is undifferentiating. The Sphinx is
monstrous because its undifferentiation represents chaotic violence. The reconciliatory victim
undifferentiates and is monstrous. Scapegoat can be thought of as a monstrous undifferentiator.
This commingled androgynous represents sexual undifferentiation. Mimetic symmetry, giving
rise to disorder and violence, is stabilized by the mechanism of scapegoating. The culture which
comes into being through this mechanism will have a structure based upon asymmetry and
differences. Again this asymmetry and these differences constitute what we call cultural order
Like Siva- the great ascetic and destroyer of the universe, world-renouncer, for Parry,
transcends duality by uniting opposites within his own person, in Girardian terminology
transgresses and undifferentiates duality by violently uniting opposites within his own person.
The theme of inversion and the coincidence of opposites, according to Parry, runs througout the
tradition of world-renunciation. This theme can be thought of as a Girardian theme of disorder
or violent undifferentiation. One obvious symbol of yogic merging of opposities is the
androgyne, that is the undifferentiated androgyne.1098
The final phase of yogic meditation is often portrayed as the merging of the inner
female energy called Kualin (the coiled serpent energy, in Hinduism) or Avadhti or
Cl (in Buddhism) situated in the lower half of the body, with a masculine principle (iva
in Hinduism, Upya in Buddhism) located in the cranial vault. This union is represented in
terms not only of energies but of sexual fluids, as well. In Hindu practice, the sanguinary
Kuali rises to join the seminal iva in the cranial vault, with the nectar produced from
their union optimally being held there by the practitioner, as a means to becoming a Siddha, a
self-made god. Buddhist yogic imagery is similar to that of the Hindus. A number of early
Vajrayna works speak of red and white sexual fluids being united into the thought of
enlightenment in the central channel; one of these texts, the Hevajra Tantra (1. 32), portrays the
internal feminine energy as the dl
C (Outcaste Woman) who blazes upward into the
cranial vault. The male moon residing there is made to melt by her heat, and their
conjoined fluid now the bodhicitta flows down through the cakras, suffusing the
practitioner as it does with the bliss of their union. Later Buddhist traditions more closely follow
the dynamic of Hindu haya yogic practice, with feminine energy being made to rise through the
cakras to the Lotus of Great Bliss in the head.1099 The Complete Phase of Supreme Yoga

1097

Ibid., 252.
Parry, Sacrificial Death and the Necrophagous Ascetic, 100.
1099
Kvrne, Per(1975).On the Concept of Sahaja in Indian Buddhist Tantric Literature. Temenos 11, pp. 88-135. P.
120-21.
1098

218

visualization in which the maala is incorporated into the subtle body is rife with the
imagery of both sexuality and death.

1100

It is a commonplace of the Hindu yogic tradition that the female Sakti, which dwells in a
tightly coiled form in the lower abdomen of humans, can be awakened through yogic practice to
uncoil and rise up-ward, along the spinal column, to the cranial vault. The idea of the upward
march of the Bodhisattva, after he produces the Bodhicitta within, got associated with the sexoyogic process of the upward march of Bodhicitta after it is produced in the plexus of the navel
reigon through the union of the Praj and Upya which were transformations of nyat and
Karu. Bodhicitta attains its perfection in the form of supreme bliss (mh-sukha) after it
reaches the highest plexus situated in the cerebrum region and this realization of the supreme
bliss makes a Bodhisattva the Buddha himself. The Mahyna conception of the production of
Bodhicitta (bodhi-citto-tpda) is transformed in Sahaja-yna into the production of a state of
intense bliss through the sexo-yogic practice; and as after the production, the Bodhicitta rises
upwards through ten stages (technically known as the Bodhisattva-bhmis) and reachs the lotus
situated in the cerebrum region (ua-kamala, i.e., the lotus in the head and corresponding to
the sahasrra-padma of the Hindu Tantras) where it will produce the Mahsukha of the nature
of Nirva. The word Bodhicitta sometimes in Vajra-yna and almost always in Sahaja-yna is
synonymous with the word semen.1101
The mechanism of concealment could be found in the so-called twilight language in
tantric Buddhism. The Tantras frequently use language that is deliberately obscure. In the
Anuttarayoga Tantras this kind of arcane language is called sandhy-b, frequently
rendered twilight language or intentional language. Tantric texts strive deliberately to
conceal their meaning. The most basic meaning of secret in the Tantric tradition is that its
theories and practices should be kept secret from those who are not fellow initiates, that is,
from those who have not obtained initiation (abhieka) or taken vows (samvara) and
pledges(samaya). When these works explain the term secret (usually guhya in Sanskrit), they
apply it to certain things that owe their secrecy to being inward or hidden, like the secret of
female sexuality. The Anuttarayoga Tantras also contain passages on the higher initiations, the
practice of which includes elements often referred to by modern writers as sexo-yogic. Briefly
speaking, these have to do with worship of the female, and, perhaps, a rite of sexual union in
which the male performer does not emit semen.1102

4.2. Twinness (sahaja) and Undifferentiation

1100
1101
1102

White, Introduction. Tantra In Practice: Mapping a Tradition, 15..

Dasgupta, An Introduction to Tntric Buddhism, 10, 142-4.
Wayman, Esoteric Buddhism, 245, 251.

219

The ultimate purpose of yoga is described as Sahaja-Samadhi.1103 Samsara and Nirvana are
the same. They are sahaja, twinned (verzwillingt) (lit. born-together), and do not exist side
by side, but within each other. Only he who has realised the twinship (sahaja of Samsara and
Nirvana) can acquire the absolute truth.1104

The yogin has to hold fast to the (realization of

the) twinship. Twinness (sahaja) can be interpreted in terms of Girardian undifferentiation. The
importance of the term sahaja in tantric Buddhist thought has long been recognized. Sahaja
literally signifies being born (-ja) together with (saha-). Sahaja samadhi is considered as the
state of non-dual consciousness, in Girardian thinking the undifferentiating and undifferentiated
state. Sahaja is an undifferentiating and transgressive abolition of the duality of subject and
object. This is one of the basic postulates of all tantric Buddhism, and is expressed in a great
variety of ways, employing cosmological, physiological, sexual and other symbols. Sahaja
meditation and worship was prevalent in Tantric traditions common to Hinduism and Buddhism
in Bengal as early as the 8th9th centuries. In popular mind the term Sahaja-yana, , as a late
antinomian offshoot of tantric Buddhism, is another name for excesses and debauchery. Sahaja
as goal of meditation is basically connected with the tantric ritual of consecration. Sahaja is a
kind of absolute, or transcendent reality, equated with the Void, nya, in Girardian viewpoint
violent undifferentiation. Non-dichotomizing thought of Buddhism can be viewed as
undifferentiating thought of Buddhist world-renouncer.
The transgressive and undifferentiating equation of nirvana and samsara by radical worldrenouncer makes sense if one adopts the mimetic mechanism as an explanatory model. To
reassert, perhaps, through iconoclastic and eccentric language and behaviour the freedom
from convention that comes with liberation), a number of Tantrics sought out the equation with
nirva by involvement in some of the most impure forms sra
of sa

- meat-eating, wine-

drinking, sex. In the Tantras the theme of the union of polar opposites came to the fore. In
Tantric Buddhism, the symbols for expressing such polarities and their union mushroomed: sun
and moon, vowels and consonants, right and left. But one of the most prevalent images that
developed was that of female and male, the union of which effected the union of wisdom and
means, of the understandings of emptiness and compassionate involvement with the forms of
this world.1105
Girards insight into violent undifferentiation can shed light on the nonduality and lack of
distinction between sasra and nirva . Some of the implications of this lack of distinction
between sasra and nirv
a are borne out in the practices or visualization-meditations
(sdhanas) of Tantric adepts. Strong has dealt with a relatively short text written in the ninth
century C.E by a yogin named Lakminkar
dev.

In her work she sets forth a method of

unconventional ritual-meditational acts designed to help one break through this world of
1103
1104
1105

Jan Gonda, Die Religionen Indiens II. Der jngere Hinduismus (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer 1963), 221.
Schumann, Buddhismus. Stifer, Schulen und Systeme, 196-7.
Strong, The Experience of Buddhism: Sources and Interpretations, 197.

220

conventional reality, this world of attachment to things, to ideas, and to the dos and donts
that go with them. Indeed, in a world that is marked by emptiness, in which sasra and
nirva are indistinguishable, nothing (or everything) is sacred, and Lakminkar
dev, l

ike

1106

later Zen masters, can even advocate murdering the Buddha.

For Girard, twins are the symbol par excellence of nondifferentiation. In the case of twins,
symmetry and identity are represented in extraordinarily explicit terms. Twins inspire fear above
all because they seem to embody the process of undifferentiation that is characteristic of a situation
of uncontrolled rivalry and violence. It is natural that twins should awaken fear, for they are
harbingers of indiscriminate violence, the greatest menace to primitive societies. The
primitive concept of a link between the loss of distinctions and violence is strange to modern
man. Girard points out the role of twins in provoking discord among neighbors, a fatal collapse
of ritual, the transgression of interdictions in short, their part in instigating a sacrificial crisis.
In Girards view, behind the image of twins lurks the baleful aspect of the sacred.1107
Girard asserts that twins offer a symbolic representation, sometimes remarkably eloquent, of
the symmetrical conflict and identity crisis that characterize the sacrificial crisis. It seems to
Girard appropriate to juxtapose the basic mythical theme of enemy brothers with the phobia
concerning twins and other fraternal resemblances. The most common of all mythical conflicts
is the struggle between brothers, which generally ends in fratricide. Ultimately, the insufficient
difference in the family relationships serves to symbolize the dissolution of family distinctions;
in other words, it desymbolizes. Such relationships thus finally contribute to the symmetry of
conflicts that is concealed in myth, but vigorously proclaimed in tragedy, which betrays this
hidden process simply by representing the mythological material on stage. The classic
definition of the symbol seems to apply to the correspondence between twins and the sacrificial
crisis.1108
The Dionysian conjunction of opposites (sexual union between world-renouncer and
prostitute) represents the undifferentiating twinship. The term Ymala (twin) describes the
(undifferentiating) union of iva and akti.1109 The term ymala was especially used by the
tradition to designate union. Its primary meaning is twin. It is remarkable that it is this term
that has been retained to translate the union of iva and akti, and there are entire compendia
which go under the name (Brahma-, Rudra-, etc.) Ymala is also the denomination of an entire
subcurrent of Tantrism. At a deeper level, the union between the sexes is merely the means to

1106
1107
1108
1109

Ibid., 198-9.
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 57-8.
Ibid., 61-3.
Goudriaan, "Introduction, History and Philosophy," 41.

221

reproduce their divine unity within each partner, and thus the figure of the twins oscillates
between that of the sexed couple and the androgyne.1110
The term ymala (twin) was applied not only to the union of the sexed couple (maithuna)
but also and especially to each partner as a fusion (smarasya) of iva and akti. For ChalierVisuvalingam, there could be no better symbol of the identity of the couple and of the
polarization of the One than the figure of the (identical) twin (s).1111 In Girardian view, it
represents a violent effacement of differences. In the case of twins, symmetry and identity are
represented in extraordinarily explicit terms.1112 The term melpa, which is defined as the
perfect unity that dissolves the dichotomy between subject and object, also refers more
concretely to the ritualized practice of group sex. The term smarasya designates the
homogeneity of the undifferentiated Consciousness, in this context the equalization (from
sama-, equal of its flow (from rasa, sap) in and especially between the opposite sexes
during their union. On a more concrete level, it is applied even to the fusion of male and
female reproductive substances.1113 We can here see the Girardian themes: the dissolving of
differences, the mimetic doubles, and the sacrificial scapegoat. Euripides follows the same
procedure in The Baccae. The symmetry is so implacably applied that in the end it dissolves the
difference between man and god. All differences dissolve and disappear.
This violent effacement of differences represented and simulated by the world-renouncing
yogi can be found also in the final stage of Laya yoga, in which the whole of the yogins
differentiated existence is totally submerged in the undifferentiated. Also rja yoga is that
which leads to immediate samdhi, or rather what Pta
jala Yoga terms as
1114

merger (asapajta samdhi).

undifferentiated

Meditational process of world-renouncing yogi can be

described as merging and undifferentiating process. There the nirvakal exists, and this is the
aspect of the cosmic energy when she is completely fused with the supreme reality, the
supreme iva. After having pierced the six cakras, Kualin

merges into nirvakal, so

named as this merger brings nirva (liberation) to the yogin. In this way Kualin unites
with iva. In the last state, this difference disappears completely, and iva and akti are
almost merged, except for the slight distinction that they exist as the self, and its awareness of
itself. This is the turya state. kta philosophy envisages the fifth state of turytta, the
absolute, undifferentiated state.1115
In Girardian view, this yogic-meditational process could be understood as a undifferentiating
process before the sacrificial death. Though necessarily downplayed in the domesticated and
1110

Elizabeth Chalier-Visuvalingam, Union and Unity in Hindu Tantrism, in Hananya Goodman (ed), Between
Jerusalem and Benares. Comparative Studies in Judaism and Hinduism (New York: State University of New York
Press, 1994), 203.
1111
Ibid., 205.
1112
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 64.
1113
Chalier-Visuvalingam, Union and Unity in Hindu Tantrism, 203.
1114
Gupta, Modes of Worship and Meditation, 164.
1115
Ibid., 178-9.

222

aestheticized setting of the Trika, it would seem that the all-consuming bliss of the kulayga
was nevertheless experienced as a mode of inner death, a dimension which is central to the
Vedic dk. The confirmation of this is to be found not only in the designation of the suumn
and, by extension, of the awakened kualin, as mana but also in the symbols of death and
the real animal sacrifices. The sacrificial death has been symbolically equated with sexual
union.1116

4.3. Monstrous Double and Demonical Buddhas

Yab-yum is a common symbol in the Buddhist art representing the male Buddha in sexual
union with his female consort. Often the male deity is sitting in lotus position while his consort
is sitting in his lap. The male figure is usually linked to compassion (karu) and skillful means
(upya-kaualya), while the female partner to 'insight' (praj). Yab-yum (Tibetan literally,
"father-mother") is generally understood to represent the twin-like unity of polarities
(Zwillingseinheit der Polaritten). 1117 Not only these sexual coincidentia oppositorum
represents the (undifferentiated) twinness, but also is terrifiying. Terrifying Buddha-Heruka
in intimate union with his angered Shakti (schreckenverbreitende Buddha-Heruka, der mit
seiner zornentbrannten Shakti in innigster Vereinigung schwelgt)1118 is twins.
Buddha couples, consisting of a male and a female Buddha in sacred sexual union
(maithuna), and other couples were depicted in tantric iconography. These deity couples occur
in both peaceful and more wrathful forms.1119 The Buddhist meditator, having already gone
through several transformations, identifies himself with the deity in his fierce manifestation,
then visualizes himself united in yab-yum embrace with his consort, and then further generates
the maala of the diety within his heart.1120
It is said that Buddhahood abides in the female organ (buddhatvam yosidyonisamritam).
This truth was discovered by kyamuni, who, according to the Chandamahrosana, conquered
Buddhahood by practising the Tntrik rites in the harm. The most conspicuous topic of this
literature is what is called the strpj, worship of women: disgusting practices, both obscene
and criminal, including incest, are a part of this pj, which is looked upon as the true heroic
behaviour(duhkara-chary) of a bodhisattva, as the fulfilment of the perfect virtues.1121
1116

Chalier-Visuvalingam, Union and Unity in Hindu Tantrism, 211-2.

Anneliese and Peter
Keilhauer, Ladakh und Zanskar. Lamaistische
Klosterkultur im Land
zwischen
Tibet und Indien ( Kln: DuMont, 1987), 131.
1118
Hermanns, Das National-Epos der Tibeter Gling Knig Ge Sar, 203.
1119
Shaw, Passionate Enlightenment. Women in Tantric Buddhism, 31.
1120
Strong, The Experience of Buddhism: Sources and Interpretations, 204.
1121
L. de la Valle Poussin, Tntrism(Buddhist), in Encyclopeadia of Religion and Ethics, James Hastings (ed).
Volume XII. p. 196.
1117

223

Heruka is one of the most popular deities of the Buddhist pantheon whose worship is
described in the Herukatantra. He stands on a corpose in the ardhaparyaka attitiude, is clad
human skin with vajra in his right hand and a kapla, full of blood, in the left. Decked in
ornaments of bones, his head is decorated with five skulls. When in embrace with this akti,
Heruka is known as Hevajra. Two-armed varieties of Heruka found in Eastern India are
characterised by the dancing pose on a corpose below, with emblems like vajra and kapla in
hands, a khatvga along with the left side of the body, garlands of skulls, etc.1122
Tantric yogis and yoginis, patterning themselves after these wrathful deities (krodhakya),
sometimes known as Herukas, or blood-drinkers, also wear tiger skins and bone ornaments
and drink out of skull-cups. The wrathful category includes male Buddhas, like hevajra, and
female Buddhas, like the lion-faced Sihamukh.1123 Demoniacal Buddhas under the name
of Klacakra, Heruka, Acala, Vajrabhairava, etcare credited with powers not inferior to those
of the celestial Buddhas themselves.1124
For Girard, what is essentially characteristic of the mythological quality of the sacred is its
dual nature it is both harmful and beneficial. It leaves the impression of a double
transcendence, a paradoxical conjunction. Demoniacal Buddhas is to be read as monstrous
double. Differences disappear in the domain of the sacred only because they are
indiscriminately mixed together and become indistinguishable in the confusion. To be
associated with the sacred is to share in this monstrocity.1125 A cult of demoniacal Buddhas
was incorporated into the Mahyna practices. These demoniacal Buddhas under the names of
Klacakra, Heruka, Acala, Vajrabhairava etc. were to be conciliated by constant worship of
themselves and their female energies, the dreadful Dkini fiendesses, with offerings and
sacrifices, magic circles, special mantra-charms, etc.1126
Snellgrove has dealt with the horrific Buddhas: As a result of aiva influence transmitted
through Tantric yogins of northeast India, celestial Buddhas of horrific appearance become
tutelary divinities in Mahyna communities from perhaps the ninth century onward. Most of
the tantras that describe these divinities provide their own special maalas, with Heruka,
Hevajra, avara, Caamahroaa, and other such horrific figures clasping their equ ally
horrific feminine partners as they dance on corpses at the center of their circle of yogins. 1127
Some of the traits of (Dionysian) iva were incorporated into Buddhist symbolism, most
notably in the iconography of Heruka Buddhas like Cakrasavara and Hevajra. 1128
Girards theory of a violence that is sometimes reciprocal, sometimes unanimous and
generative, explains very well the double nature of all primitive divinities, the blending of
1122

Bhattacharyya, Buddhism in the History of Indian Ideas, 288.

1123

Shaw, Passionate Enlightenment. Women in Tantric Buddhism, 28.

Bhattacharyya, Buddhism in the History of Indian Ideas, 249.
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 282.
Bhattacharyya, Buddhism in the History of Indian Ideas, 15.
Snellgrove, Celestial Buddhas and Bodhisattvas, 383-4.
Shaw, Passionate Enlightenment. Women in Tantric Buddhism, 32.

1124
1125
1126
1127
1128

224

beneficent and maleficent that characterizes all mythical figures. In fact, there is no ancient
divinity who does not have a double face. If the Roman Janus turns to his worshippers a
countenance alternately warlike and peaceful, that is because he too reflects the same alternation.
For Girard, the surrogate victim meets his death in the guise of the monstrous double.1129
Wrathful and terrifying Buddha couples as a kind of monstrous double meets his sacrificial
death in the context of Buddhist meditational initiation. All sacred creatures, for Girard, partake
of monstrosity, whether overtly or covertly. This aspect of their nature can be traced to the
monstrous double. The combination of beneficent and maleficent constitutes the original and
fundamental monstrosity, the superhuman creatures absorption of the difference between
good and bad difference, that basic difference that dominates all others.1130
The sacred king as a reconciliatory victim is sacred monster in every possible sense of the
term. He is simultaneously god, man, and savage beast. Royal titles like the Lion or the
Leopard may degenerate into mere formulas, but they have their origin in memories of the
monstrous double and generative unanimity. Moral and physical monstrosities are thus blended
and confused. Like Oedipus, the king is at once stranger and son, the most intimate of insiders
and the most bizarre of outsiders; he is an exemplar of enormous tenderness and frightful
savagery. As an incestuous criminal, he stands above and beyond all the rules he promulgates
and enforces. He is the wisest and the most lunatic. Surrogate victim embodies indeterminate
nature of the hallucinated undifferentiation.1131
We can interpret the following story about Buddha couples (The Dancer and the King ) as
monstrous double in the light of Girards scapegoat mechanism. The terrifying herukas as
aspects of the same numinosum in the mysterium tremendum, which cause human beings to
tremble, seems to represent monstrous double being in the state of violent effacement of
differences. Monstrousness, according to Girard, is linked with undifferentiation. Mythical
monsters are undifferentiating creatures. Buddha heruka is a wrathful, cremation-ground form
of the god in union with an equally terrible consort.1132
In the Hevajratantra, Hevajra is seen to be a heruka form, that is, a type of wild enlightened
being who dwells in cremation grounds with a retinue of cremation-ground deities and spirits.
Girards theory sheds new light on the Buddhist story about wrathful and monstrous BuddhaHeruka (ombheruka). ombi Heruka (Skt. ombi Heruka or ombipa) is one of the eightyfour Mahasiddhas. ombi Heruka was originally an Indian King who, according to legend,
deserted his throne so as to live with an outcaste entertainer's (Dombi) daughter. Dom's were
outcaste traveling entertainers, and most frequently, workers in the cremation grounds employed
to burn the dead. Since their close association with death and the fact that they handled corpses
was horrifying to ordinary people, they were generally shunned by society.
1129
1130
1131
1132

Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 251.

Ibid.
Ibid., 252-3.
English, Vajrayogin : Her Visualizations, Rituals & Forms : A Study of the Cult of Vajrayogin in India, 37-8.

225

The transgressive and undifferentiating conjunction of opposites (sexual union between king
and a outcaste female ) can be understood as a kind of undifferentiating crimes of reconciliatory
victims. Surrogate victim commits a crime of undifferentiation. A king gave up his throne to
join destinies with a dancer. She is omb
yogin, while the king is known to history only as
ombpa and ombheruka, names he received by virtue of his association with her . The
presence of ombyogin in the palace remained a secret for twelve years, until the kings
subjects discovered their relationship. The tantric siddhass transgressive unconventionality, in
Girardian terms undifferentiating crimes of siddhas as surrogate victim often brought social
criticism and attack. The king Dombi-heruka took a low-caste or outcaste girl, violating of all
convention. Therefore the subjects drove Dombi-heruka and his consort into exile in the
wilderness. After being drvien from the kingdom, the couple secluded themselves in a
wilderness hermitage and meditated in retreat for another twelve years. The fortunes of the
kingdom declined so much during the rulers absence that his contrite subjects decided to invite
him back. Clearly both the dancer and the king had made progress during their retreat. They
mounted a tigress and rode her into town, brandishing a poisonous snake as whip. The ministers
and people begged their exiled lord to be king again. Dombi-Heruka told the people he would
not do so. He said that by consorting with an outcaste woman, he has lost caste. However, since
in death all such distinctions come to an end, let us now be properly cremated, he said.
Consequently a great sandalwood pyre was erected, which both king and consorts mounted. The
cremation pyre then burned for seven days. When at last the flames died down, the ministers
and people were astonished to witness Dombi-Heruka dancing in the heart of the fire in the
form of mighty Hevajra. ombyogin and the king later transformed into Nairtmy and
Hevajra, one of the Buddha couples.1133
There were many doubles in Greece, and duels always occurred. There was neither the
singular nor the plural, but always a crisis. There are Eteocles and Polynices, Seven Against
Thebes, the famous chorus, which is also double. Girard sees the duel as the end of misleading
differentiation. Rivalry between twins always precedes a murder that re-establishes the unity,
the false peace that every society needs. Totality of the city, duality of enemy brothers, unity of
the victim: this is how the victim-based polarization works. The city controls its own violence
by concentrating it on a third party.1134
The sameness of all people, the symmetry of myth, the leveling of all distinctions, which is
the result of the fight between doubles that, in what Girard calls the sacrificial crisis, leads to the
convergence of a group onto a sacrificial victim. In the story about Mahsiddha ombi,
accusations made against a victim can be found in the public outrage over the self-degradation
of the king that was caused by the transgressive relationship with low-caste woman. The
reconciliatory victim meets his sacrificial death (buring at the stake) in the guise of the
1133
1134

Shaw, Passionate Enlightenment. Women in Tantric Buddhism, 63.

Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benot Chantre, 103-4.

226

monstrous double and later is sacralized as terrifying Buddha heruka: They climbed in the eyes
of the population the stake in order to submit to the ordeal. Seven days the flame was burning.
In the middle of the flame, the king at times took the form of Hevajra Heruka. When the
wood was burned and the ashes were swept up, they found the king and the yogini intact in a
lotus flower.1135
For Girard, any violent effacement of differences, even if initially restricted to a single pair
of twins, reaches out to destroy a whole society. In the case of twins, symmetry and identity are
represented in extraordinarily explicit terms. The representation of nondifference ultimately
becomes the very exemplar of difference, a classic monstrosity that plays a vital role in sacred
ritual. According to Girard, Being made up of differences, language finds it almost impossible
to express undifferentiation directly. 1136 Viewed from the standpoint of the differentiating
mechanism of surrogate victim, we have interpreted the representation of violent
undifferentiation by the Buddhist specialists of the festive sacred. Monstrosities recur
throughout mythology. Girard concludes that myths make constant reference to the sacrificial
crisis, but do so only in order to disguise the issue. Myths are the retrospective transfiguration of
sacrificial crises; the reinterpretation of these crises in the light of the cultural order that has
arisen from them.1137

4.4. Monstrous Buddha Couples and Logic of Nonduality

Wrathful Buddhas represents the sacrificial crisis within the context of Buddhist initiation:
Wrathful deities demonstrate that there is pure energy even at the heart of aggression. Wrath and
anger are not totally eliminated on the Buddhist path because at times it may be necessary to
wield the appearance of wrath in order to rescue, liberate, or protect someone.1138 Passionate
enlightenment produced by the forest representatives of the Dionysian reversal of values (worldrenouncing and violently undifferetiating Buddha couples) can be viwed in the light of Girards
surrogate victim mechanism. Girardian reading of the yogic-meditational process has shown
that ritual meditation of Buddhisms seems to represent a process of violent undifferentiation.
Rituals confirm, Girard believes, that primitive societies are obsessed with the
undifferentiation or conflictual reciprocity that must result from the spread of mimetic rivalry.
Many rituals begin with a mimetic free-for-all during which hierarchies disintegrate,

1135

Hans Wolfgang Schumann, Buddhistische Bilderwelt. Ein ikonographisches Handbuch des Mahayana- und
Tantrayana-Buddhismus (Mnchen:Diederichs, 1986), 277.
1136
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 63-4.
1137
Ibid., 64.
1138
Shaw, Passionate Enlightenment. Women in Tantric Buddhism, 31.

227

prohibitions are transgressed, and all participants become each others conflictual doubles or
twins.1139
In the radical forms of the Tantric union, there was a predilection for untouchable women
drawn even from the castes related to the cremation ground rituals. The breaking of castebarriers through the joint participation of Brahmins and untouchables is merely the systematic
application of the valorization of impurity in a dialectic of transgression.1140 In Girardian
reading, this transgressive violation of differential caste system by tantric and Dionysian sexual
union represents the violent effacement of difference (leffacement des differences) and the
symmetrical double (les doubles symtriques) just before the sacrificial death. Resulting from
the collapse of all differences and concentrating within itself all the violence that has invaded
the society, seen as the demoniac source of all disorders as well as the divine agent of the
reconciliation that accompanies its destruction, the surrogate victim appears as a monstrous
double, as an overdetermined local singularity that assembles within itself a whole global
structure and contains the potential for all possible transformations of this same structure.1141
Girards insight into the warring twins helps us to understand the wrathful and terrifying
Buddhas couples who sit melting into one another, playing the game of their antagonistic
traits.1142 The undifferentiating coincidentia oppositorum between the world-renouncer and the
prostitute (Buddha couple) seems to resemble the warring twins or enemy twins in Girardian
theory. The twinlike Buddha couples playing the antagonistic game seems to represent les
doubles symtriques, lidentit des antagonists and the undifferentiated symmetries in the
relationship between doubles in Girardian terminology. Girard sheds new light on a number of
classical topics in anthropology, among which beliefs and rituals about twins. In myth and legend,
symmetrical twins are depicted as enemies, forever engaged in bitter rivalry. Consequently, a
society in the state of rivalry and conflict may be depicted in mythical stories as a society consisting
of twins. Twins are associated with rivalry and generalized social strife. The process of
undifferentiation which causes that multitude of doubles to come into existence evokes the idea of a
contagious disease, which is what the birth of twins in some societies is believed to bring about. As
we have seen, twins are associated with rivalry and generalized social strife. Symmetry and
twinship functioned as a symbol of rivalry and social conflict. We can detect the the violent
elimination of differences between the antagonists of Buddha couples, their total identity and
their tragic relationships.
Monstrous Buddha couples and Buddhist logic of nonduality rooted in this ritualistic
coincidentia oppositorum can be understood in the Girardian sense of two-in-one crisis, the

1139

Girard in Williams (ed), The Girard Reader, 10.

Chalier-Visuvalingam, Union and Unity in Hindu Tantrism, 212.
1141
Lucien Scubla, Towards a Morphogenetic Anthropology: Singularity Theory and Generative Violence, in
Synthesis. An interdisciplinary journal. Chaos in the Humanities 1/1 (1995), 116.
1142
Heinrich Zimmer, Indische Mythen und Symbole (Dsseldorf/Kln: Diederichs, 1972), 163, 166.
1140

228

sacrificial crisis, or crisis of distinctions.1143 We can see this ritualistic crisis not only in realms
of Greek tragedy or Shakespearean drama, but also in Buddhist rituals and logics. As we have
seen, the twinness (sahaja) and nonduality between nirvana and samsara means violent
undifferentiation and transgression. There is antinomian implication in the equalization of
transcendence and delusion which may result in an unintended sanctification of defilment.1144
The violently undifferentiated Buddha couples seems to represent the tragic struggle of
doubles, which can be seen in all myths, even though sacrifice and divinization of victims hid
the mechanism for a time.1145
We have interpreted the fearful symmetry and twinship between terrrifying Buddha couples
in terms of the monstrous double. Twinship appears to be the most pregnant symbol of mimetic
rivalry and symmetry. The surrogate victim appears as a monster. He is no longer regarded in
the same way as the other members of the community. If the sacrificeable categories are
generally made up of creatures who do not and have never belonged to the community, that is
because the surrogate victim belongs first and foremost to the sacred. As we have seen, the
liminal and ambivalent world-renouncer belongs to the (violent) sacred of chaotic jungle. Ritual
victims are chosen from outside the community, from creatures (like animals and strangers )
that normally dwell amidst sacred things and are themselves imbued with sacredness. The
surrogate victim is not simply foreign to the community. Rather, he is seen as a monstrous
double. He partakes of all possible differences within the community, particularly the
difference between within and without. The surrogate victim passes freely from the interior to
the exterior and back again. The sacrificial victim must reincarnate the monstrous double.1146

5. Verbal Contest, Stichomythia and Kan

5. 1. Play of Differentiation and Undifferentiation
For Girard, what immediately disconcert the modern reader when faced with the Brahmanas
are the countless little narrativesnever identical but always fairly similar that are strewn
throughout these works. They all treat of the same theme: the intense rivalry, ever renewed,
between the Devas and the Asuras, that is, between the gods and the demons.1147 Many
1143

Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 52.

Steven Heine, Putting the Fox Back in the Wild Fox Kan: The Intersection of Philosophical and Popular
Religious Elements in the Chan/Zen Kan Tradition, in Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 56/2 (1996), 283.
1145
Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benot Chantre, 24.
1146
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 270-1.
1147
Girard, Le sacrifice, 17.
1144

229

indications confirm that everything in the Brahmanas is organized by the principle of mimetic
desire. One of the most conspicuous aspects of this conformity is the loss of differentiation, the
blurring of the distinction between gods and demons in the course of their rivalries. Violent
reciprocity makes them exact copies of each other, like the enemy twins who abound in archaic
myths. According to Girard, in founding myths, the theme of enemy twins often stands for the
undifferentiating reciprocity of mimesis. In the Brahmanas the question of twins is posed
apropos of the Devas and the Asuras, but it is never resolved. It is presented as undecidable.
And that, it seems to Girard, is a radical version of mythic indifferentiation.1148
Scholars of Vedic literature have long been fascinated and perplexed by a complex of motifs,
which can be refered to here as agnostic. First and foremost among these is the liturgical
evocation of an eternal strife between Devas (gods) and Asuras (anti-gods). rauta rituals
include also a variety of ritual performances having to do with conflict and competition:
activities such as mock fights, ritual attacks on the person of the sacrificier, ritual exchanges of
obscenities, ritual gambling, and ritual verbal contests.1149
There are the verbal contests, especially the brahmodyas or disputations in which the
participants challenge each other with riddle questions that holds the cosmic brahman secret and
that provided the model for the great Upaniadic debates. At the other end of the sacrificer, after
the oblation, at the distribution of the dakis and the festival meal, there still is the
antithetical or even agonistic matter of acceptance. Although they are sportive games these
contests are no less consequential and bloody. According to Heesterman, even the verbal games
of the brahmodya, as the Upaniads show, are far from harmless. The loser who does not
acknowledge his defeat in time may pay for it with his head. It does seem that originally this
was simple hyperbole. The loser may well have been the victim providing the head of the
sacrifice, a frequent expression for elements of the ritual considered important, which harks
back to the original immolatory practice of cutting off the head.1150
Mimetic theory can help bring clarity to this agonistic nature of Vedic sacrifice. For Girard,
only the victimary mechanism and the conditions that trigger its release are able to account for
the close but complex relationship between the rivalry and sacrifice, which expel each other
reciprocally yet remain inseparable. For Girard, more perspicacious than modern human
sciences, the Brahmanas see the mimetic nature of desire. If rivalries abound in these works, it
is because they abound in our world and because they always accompany sacrifice. 1151 In many
archaic societies, the great sacrifices begin with a simulacrum of crisis, a staged disordering
of the community. The strategists of sacrifice saw clearly in mimetic rivalries a factor favorable

1148

Ibid., 22-3.
Tamar C. Reich, Sacrificial Violence and Textual Battles: Inner Textual Interpretation in the Sanskrit
Mahbhrata, in History of Religions 41/2 (2001), 145.
1150
Heesterman, The Broken World of Sacrifice. An Essay in Ancient Indian Ritual, 42.
1149

1151

Girard, Le sacrifice, 24.

230

to the release of the reconciling mechanism, and they deliberately cultivated them in preparation
for sacrifice, to facilitate the polarization of a single victim. The mimetic rivalries of the
Brahmanas are, for Girard, a literary representation of the same idea.1152
The agonistic or conflictual nature of verbal contest is also a typical element of the Buddhist
kan. Kan as a kind of verbal contest can be understood as a simulacrum of crisis within the
context of Buddhist initiation. The agonistic or conflictual nature of Chan dialogues,
sometimes called Dharma battles, has often been pointed out, but it is usually downplayed as
a skillful means used by master to test and awaken his disciple. Clearly, this interpretation, for
Faure, cannot simply be taked for granted in the case of those masters whom Linji called blind
shavepates and wild foxes. Quite possibly, many of them were symbolically, socially, or
psychologically empowered by their (symmetrical) confrontations with novices. This
encounter produces a winner and a loser; and the gain and the loss are very real: like the deadly
words of witchcraft, the dialogue seems to activate quasi-magical forces. 1153 Mon-d
(question-answer) is verbal battle (Wortgefecht) between master and disciple.1154
But this violent, agonistic or conflictual nature of Chan dialogues, language game was
sometimes misunderstood in the sense of playful quality of language. It was argued that Chan
Buddhist and Derrida share some similar ideas about the nature of words, the disruptive
nature of language, the playful quality of language, and the significance of silence. The
importance of the performative nature of language for Chan teachers, it is argued, is clearly
distinct from Derridas position, although both parties seek to use language in a nonrepresentational way. When many encounters between Chan monks and others are grasped as
ludic activities within the context of a language game, this, according to Olson, represents
an example of a common thread running through Chan literature and Derridas understanding
of language. Even though Chan master was famous for his use of violence as a teaching device,
his violent methods were understood to be often within a playful context. If the Chan
dialogical encounters posses a ludic quality, a similar spirit of playfulness is evident in the
philosophy of Derrida, who does philosophy in the spirit of play, due in large part to the play
element that is embodied within language, which represents a play of differences.

1155

But this performative playfulness must be viewed within the sacrificial context of ritual
initiation. These violent methods of linguistic simulation of the sacrificial crisis within the
context of Buddhist initiation are to be understood as representing a (initiatory) play of
differentiation and undifferentiation in Girardian sense. For Girard, great theater is necessarily
a play of differentiation and undifferentiation.1156 Buddhist (no)-theater and ritual process of
(initiatory) meditation can be also considered in this sense. Girard subordinates play to religion,
1152
1153
1154
1155
1156

Ibid., 24, 27.

Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights. An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition, 213.
Hugo M. Enomiya-Lasalle, Zen-Buddhismus (Kln : J.P. Bachem, 1974), 49.
Olson, Zen and the Art of Postmodern Philosophy, 25, 35.
Girard, A Theatre of Envy: William Shakespeare, 254.

231

and in particular to the sacrificial crisis. Play has a religious origin, to be sure, for Girard,
insofar as it reproduces certain aspects of the sacrificial crisis.1157
Buddhist use of language in a so-called non-representational way can be read as a kind of
linguistic simulation of the violent undifferentiation. Girards insights into the play of
differentiation and undifferentiation seems to provide an explanation as to these Buddhist
agonistic, symmetrical, conflictual playfulness of confrontation. These initiatory confrontations
with Buddhist novices as well as a tragic confrontation in classical drama of Greek tragedy1158
can be read in terms of the simulacrum of sacrificial crisis. In a round table on Chan, Nishitani
Keiji stated that these encounters, different from the dialogues that take place in schools or
elsewhere, were direct body attacks, while his interlocutor, Shibayama Zenkei, compared their
protagonists to two swordsmen fighting with real swords. 1159 This Buddhist tragic,
symmetrical and agonistic confrontations or encounters reproduce certain aspects of the
sacrificial crisis.
Heesterman asserts that violent contest and estoeric knowledge are intimately
connected. The brahman seems, for him, to have been originally the winning enigmatic truth
formulation in a verbal contest, the brahmodya. Though seemingly a peaceful pastime, the
violence involved in it should not be underrated, for, as the oldest Upaniads tell us, the
unsuccessful contestant might have to pay for his imprudence with his life.1160

5.2. Kan, Stichomythia and Simulation of Mimetic Crisis

Buddhist kan as a Girardian simulation of crisis can be compared with stichomythia in
Greek tragedy as verbal contests. For Girard, if the art of Greek tragedy is to be defined in a
single phrase, we might call attention to one of its most characteristic traits: the opposition of
symmetrical elements. There is no aspect of the plot, form, or language of a tragedy in which
this symmetrical pattern does not recur. The core of the drama is that the two protagonists
exchange insults and accusations with increasing earnestness and rapidity. The Greek public is
brought to these verbal contests. The symmetry of the tragic dialogue is perfectly mirrored
by the stichomythia, in which the two protagonists address one another in alternating lines.
Stichomythia is particularly well suited to sections of dramatic dialogue where two characters
are in violent dispute. The rhythmic intensity of the alternating lines combined with quick,
1157

Ren Girard, Violence and the Sacred (New York/London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005),

163.
1158

Ren Girard, Violence and the Sacred (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), 56.
See The Eastern Buddhists 8, 2 (October 1975), 70 sq (cited in Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights. An
Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition, 213, n. 23).
1160
Heesterman, The Inner Conflict of Tradition. Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society, 126.
1159

232

biting ripostes in the dialogue can be quite powerful. In tragic dialogue hot words, as Girard
puts it, are substituted for cold steel. But whether the violence is physical or verbal, the suspense
remains the same. The adversaries match blow for blow, and they seem so evenly matched that
it is impossible to predict the outcome of the battle.1161
Kan is absurd, nonsensical, paradoxical.1162 Kan has its performative nature. Chan
dialogues, for Faure, often end with blows (coups), it is because they are themselves coups,
that is, hits or moves in a game. They were not so much intended to express a meaning, as to
impress an interlocutor, to gain the upper hand in a contest where all moves were allowed.
Chan dialogues could at times become deadly serious language games. For Faure, the
meaning of the kan is not to be found at the semantic or syntactic levels, but at the semiotic,
pragmatic or performative levels.1163 It has been argued that many encounters between Chan
monks and others can be grasped as ludic activities within the context of a language game,
representing an example of a common thread running through Chan literature and Derridas
understanding of language. But Girards thought on the ritual reproduction of the sacrificial
crisis seems to me more persuasive for the understanding of this seemingly ludic and playful,
but deadly serious and violent language games and verbal battle. It seems to me that the
meaning of the kan lies in a ritual reproduction of sacrificial crisis at the linguistic level.
Not only verbal contests in Indian and Buddhist context (brahmodyas and kan), but also
Greek verbal contests and its tragic suspense follows the rhythm of these rapid exchanges, each
one of which promises to bring matters to a head. The symmetry of the battle can be found in
Greek tragedy as well as in Buddhist kan. The conflict is now transferred to a purely verbal
plane, transforming itself into a true tragic dialogue. Tragedy now assumes its proper function
as a verbal extension of physical combat, an interminable debate set off by the chronically
indecisive character of an act of violence committed previously. The tragic dialogue is, for
Girard, a debate without resolution.1164
Brahmodyas and kan are also a debate without resolution producing a simulation of crisis.
Sacrifice implies rivalry almost by definition. The contest is, according to Heesterman, therefore
essential to sacrifice, the highest because most dangerous, as well as the most consequential,
form of play. One is compelled to go on playing the game of the sacrificial contest.1165 This is
particularly relevant to the verbal contest known as brahmodya, in which the contenders fight
each other with enigmatic formulations. The conclusion of the contest is at the same time the
resolution of the enigma. Staking his all on his final statement the winning contestant imposes

1161

Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 44.

Winston L. King, Buddhist Meditation, in Joseph M. Kitagawa and Mark D. Cummings (ed), Buddhism and
Asian History. Religion, History, and Culture. Readings from the Encyclopedia of Religion (Mircea Eliade, Editor in
Chief) (New York: Macmillan Publishing Company, 1987), 335.
1163
Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights. An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition, 212-5.
1164
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 45.
1165
Heesterman, The Broken World of Sacrifice. An Essay in Ancient Indian Ritual, 43.
1162

233

silence on his opponent. 1166 The enigma cannot be objectively solved, it can only be
circumscribed in antithetical formulations and acted out by the contending parties who, like
two on the same chariot, are bound together by the contest. In fact, an objective solution is not
aimed at. The pivotal concern is the antithetical complementarity. The antithesis is not an
abstract problem to be solved once for all. It is a concrete contest between opposite parties.1167
For Girard,1168 Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides all utilize the same procedures and
almost identical phraseology to convey symmetry, identity, reciprocity. This antithetical
formulations, enigmatic formulations and agonistic complementarity can be found also in the
Buddhist verbal contests (kan). According to Heesterman, the essence of verbal contests seem
to have been an exchange enigmatic formulations. The question of the challenger is couched
in terms of a well-turned enigma to which his opponent should reacht, not with a clear-cut,
unambiguous solution, but with an equally enigmatic rejoiner, till one of the parties is reduced
to silence or till the strongest, well aware of his strength, enforces the silence by withdrawing.
The solution of the enigma, the brhman itself, is not explicitly stated. It remains hidden in the
antithetical relation between the elements of the enigma. For instance the brahmodya hymn
RV. 1. 164 consists of a series of antithetical formulations without the antithesis being
resolved.1169
Breaking of syntax and logic in the kan1170 appears to mean a simulation of logical crisis
within the initiatory context of Buddhist meditation. This breaking of syntax and logic seems to
represents a violent undifferentiation of commonsensical logic. Buddhist logic of nonduality has
to be understood also in this sense of breaking, dissolving and undifferentiation of normal
logic. As Faure argues, the common interpreation of the kan as an irrational riddle designed
to create in the practitioner a kind of psychological double bind- Hakuins great doubt
that will eventually force him to bypass or break through his intellectual hindrances, is not
entirely convincing. The psychological elaboration provided by Suzuki for well-meaning
psychoanalysts is, according to Faure, clearly a further rationalization that significantly
contributed to the development of a false consciousness and some enduring misunderstanding
concerning Chan practice. In Girardian interpretation, the kan can be considered as an
irrational and antilogical riddle designed to create in the practitioner a kind of simulacrum of
crisis great doubt in preparation of the initiatory death (great death). Ritual, mantric, or
incantatory use of paradoxical or cryptic expressions (kan) that are words destined to put an
end to words must not be overlooked.1171

1166

Ibid., 153.
Jan C. Heesterman, "The Origin of the Nstika," Wiener Zeitschrift fr die Kunde. Sid-und Ostasiens 12-13
(1968-69), 184.
1168
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 46.
1169
Heesterman, The Inner Conflict of Tradition. Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society, 172.
1170
Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights. An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition, 196.
1171
Ibid., 211-2.
1167

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Therefore, symmetrical, warlike and agonistic verbal battles (in Buddhist yogic-meditative
initiation) has to be thought of as a preparatory stages of rude awakening and sacrificial
enlightenment. In the preparatory stages of a ritual immolation, symmetrically arranged
antagonists hold warlike dances or real and simulated battles. Familial and social hierarchies are
reversed or suppressed. These features, according to Girard, may be interpreted as traces of
some crisis of degree climaxed by its habitual resolution, the collective transfer on a single
victim.1172
In his article Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience, Sharf has
pointed out the ritual nature of Zen Buddhism and of ritualized verbal exchanges, dialoges and
contests (kan). The word Zen commonly conjures up images of austere black-robed monks
wholly intent upon reaching enlightenment (satori) through the practice of introspective
meditation under a strict master. But such a image is, according to Sharf, in part the product of
twentieth-century Japanese intellectuals who appropriated exegetical strategies borrowed from
the West in their effort to rationalize Japanese Buddhism. Japanese Zen apologists, conversant
in contemporary Western philosophy, emphasized the role of religious experience. In point of
fact, traditional Chan and Zen practice was oriented not towards engendering enlightenment
experiences, but rather to perfecting the ritual performance of Buddhahood. In the case of
Rinzai Zen, repertoire of Buddhist monks includes mastering vast selections from Zen kan
collections and commentaries so to be able to guide students through ritualized koan
exchanges. Here too, prescriptive religious texts are treated not so much as practical guides
for meditation, but rather as liturgies to be memorized for ritual performance.1173 Zen koans
may have been used originally in esoteric rituals of transmission, but they became the
defining mark of postmortem ordinations performed on behalf of laypeople.1174
This Buddhist initiatory exchange of harsh words could be understood to follow the pattern
identified by Girard in the similar exchange with its symmetrical structure between Oedipus and
Tiresias. Girards theory on the tragic confrontation of mimetic doubles seems to make sense of
this Buddhist verbal contests. For Girard, in order to simulate sacrificial crisis, the simulation of
combat and the rhythmic foot-stamping accompanied by war cries, which are transformed into
martial songs come; there are then bellicose dances, which give way finally to simple dances
and songs. The most delicately choreopgraphed patterns, positions exchanged while partners
remain face to face, mirroring effects- all of this, Girard argues, can be read as the purifed and
schematized trace of past confrontations. In order to reproduce a model of the mimetic crisis in
a spirit of social harmony, the enactment must be progressively emptied of all real violence so
that only the pure form is allowed to survive. Girard concludes that such a form is always a
matter of doubles, that is, partners in reciprocal imitation; the model of the most abstract ritual
1172
1173
1174

Girard, "To Double Business Bound": Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology, 147.
Sharf, Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience, 243.
Faure, Visions of Power. Imagining Medieval Japanese Buddhism, 219.

235

dances is always that of the confrontation of doubles, although it has been entirely
aestheticized.1175

5.3. Sacrificial dimension of the Buddhist Initiation

As we have seen, this simulation of sacrificial crisis through the verbal contests (brahmodya
and kan) must be explained within the context of the initiation. Buddhist masters act of
violence 1176 is to be read as initiatory violence. Schwarz 1177 has rightly pointed out
similarities between initiatory violence of Buddhist meditation and the practice of initiation
rituals in other societies. Often the initiatory process is symbolized as the initiate's death and
subsequent rebirth. While these formal aspects of tribal initiation may also be associated with
yogic initiation. The ritualization of the daily life in Zen monasteries provides, according to
Faure, many cases of euphemization of symbolic violence, that is, of a gentle, invisible form
of violence, which is never recognized as such. The ritualized staff beatings (kysaku) during
meditation retreats (sesshin) and the traditional thirty strokes given by the master to his
questioners in the yulu literature are only the most obvious cases.1178
The Buddhist meditation is understood as a "part of initiation rite."1179 As an initiation rite,
zazen is not only a rite of passage placing the practioner in the liminal phase, it also institutes a
different of nature by institutionalizing liminality.1180 Eliade1181 has analyzed the symbolism
of initiation in yoga and Buddhism (See chapter 5. Yoga Techniques in Buddhism. The Road to
Nirva and the Symbolism of Initiation). Characterstic for yoga is its initiatory structure.

Buddhist road to enlightenment is connected with the symbolism of initation. Therefore the
symbolisms of death, rebirth, and initiation persist in Buddhist texts. The initiatory symbolism
is obvious. Ananda Coomaraswamy has shown that the Buddhist ordination continued the Vedic
initiation (dk) and adhered to the schema of initiations in general.
Rituals of passage or initiation, like all rituals, are, Girard writes, based on sacrifice.
Accordingly every radical change is a kind of resurrection rooted in the death that precedes it. In
the first place, the phase of crisis, the initiates died, as it were, to their childhood. In some
communities, from time to time, one of the initiates did not rise again, did not come out of the
ritual ordeal alive, and this was regarded as a favorable sign for all the other initiates. Everyone
1175

Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 21.

Ernst Schwarz, Bi-yn-lu, Aufzeichnungen des Meisters vom Blauen Fels Kan Sammlung (Mnchen:
Ksel, 1999), 215.
1177
Ibid., 214-5.
1178
Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy. A Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism, 23.
1179
Dumoulin, stliche Meditation und christliche Mystik, 144.
1180
Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy. A Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism, 296.
1181
Eliade, Yoga. Unsterblichkeit und Freiheit, 171.
1176

236

saw in the one death a providential reinforcement of the sacrificial dimension of the initiation
process.1182
Based on the initiatory understanding of Buddhist world-renouncing and body-renouncing
meditation on death and emptiness, I attempt to read this yogic-meditational process in the light
of Girardian sacrificial reading of initiation rites. According to Faure, the Chan school achieved
a ritualization of all the aspects of Buddhist world-renouncers life, and spontaneity itself,
although highly valued as an ideal, was ritually framed in Chan dialogues. The physical
painfulness of cross-legged sitting or the exacting perfection of ritual gestures inscribe Chan
orthopraxy on the body of practitioners. This emphasis on the body, which finds, for Faure, its
hyperbole in the Buddhist ideal of self-mummificaition, seems paradoxical in a school
apparently so concerned with mind. Buddhist monks fulfills all his daily routines under the
supervision of his peers and superiors, and the ritualized meetings with the master (J.
dokusan) reinforce this constant scrutinity.1183
By way of a general outbreak of violence and universal loss of difference that is, by way
of sacrificial crisis the community, as Girard puts it, achieved a differentiated order in former
times. Differences will be restored or established; specifically, the neophyte will gain his
coveted new status. It also reminds us that the celebrants in certain festivals are required to
perform a number of actions that are normally forbidden: real or symbolic acts of sexual
aggression, stealing, the eating of proscribed foods. In some societies cannibalism, prohibited at
all other times, forms the essence of the initiation rites. For the Tupinamba the murder of a
prisoner constitutes the rite. Indeed, in many societies the ultimate act of initiation is the killing
of an animal or a human being.1184In this sense of initiatory simulation of sacrificial crisis, the
sacred madness and crazy wisdom of Buddhist radical world-renouncer has to be comprehended.
One of the widespread justifications of ritual transgression is, as Faures asserts, holy madness.
In many cultures, the sage behaves as a madman or an idiot; he is characterized by an excess or
hubris that leads him to deny social norms. A simulated or strategic madness or controlled
madness of Buddhist eminent monks1185seems to stand for the initiatory simulation of the
sacrificial crisis.
For Girard, the real catharsis occurs only because we introduce a little disorder into the
rite so that something new will be produced. The more violence there is, the more catharsis
there will be in the end. Every rite, Girard says, is thus a kind of founding murder, and every
murder has a bit of a ritual aspect.1186Any man deprived of his status is transformed into a
monstrous double. Like Dionysus or the sacred king, he becomes a lion or a leopard for the
duration of the initiatory crisis, expressing himself solely in growls and roars. In some rites,
1182
1183
1184
1185
1186

Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 90.

Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights. An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition, 259-60.
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 283.
Faure, The Red Thread. Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality, 100-1.
Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benot Chantre, 140.

237

normally marking the culmination of the crisis, he exhibits all the characteristics of violent
possession. In addition to rites specifically designed to simulate the crisis itself, Girard has
dealt with details that reproduce the unanimous violence directed against the surrogate victim
and that serve to bring the whole ritualistic process to a close. The introduction of masks at the
supreme moment of the process can be taken as a direct allusion to the monstrous double.
Initiation rites, according to Girard, bears witness to the violent resolution of the crisis and the
subsequent return to order; that is, to the neophytes assumption of their new and definitive
status. The purpose of rites of passage, then, is to graft onto the model of the original crisis any
burgeoning crisis brought into being by a sudden outbreak of undifferentiation. The rites of
initiation invariably entail a repetition of the original solution, a rebirth of differences.1187
Buddhist yogic world-renouncers meditative process and its transgressive logic of nonduality
also might be described as a violently undifferentiating process for the rebirth of differences.
Therefore the initiatory and undifferentiating transgressions of the Buddhist specialists of
the sacred can be properly explained in terms of the initiatory crimes of the reconciliatory
victims. For Faure, despite their importance in Chan Buddhism, these eccentrics seem to
represent the nostalgia of a lost spontaneity that contemporary imitations made even more
distant; for all the lip service; crazy Chan was still perceived as a dangerous ideal by (and
for) the majority of Chinese Buddhists. Chan madmen have always, according to Faure, been
an endangered, or at least protected, species. As Faure puts it, they serve as an outlet or
alibi for a traditional that is at bottom ritualist and hierarchical.1188
Not only Chan madmen, but also Buddhist Dionysian world-renuncer seem to serve as an
outlet for the differentiated and hierarchical world order. In Girardian thinking, social cohesion
and the avoidance of anarchy depend upon finding a collective outlet for the build-up of
aggressive impulses. Thus the function of Dionysian institution of world-renunciation and forest
world-renouncer can be understood to afford a structured outlet for sacrificial violence, thus
providing a social mechanism whereby the spiral of mimetic violence is channelled and
contained. From the Girardian viewpoint, these Buddhist radical world-renouncers seem to
serve as a violently undifferentiating reconciliatory victim for the differentiated world order. As
we have seen, world-renouncer and the festive institution of world-renunciation serve as an
safty valve for the world order (Dumont). For Faure, perhaps madness was too subversive for
a Chan orthodoxy that, by placing the ex-centrics at the center of its discourse, always tried to
neutralize or exorcize them.1189
This mimetic reading of the paradoxical, nonconventional and criminal acts of the Buddhist
sacred madmen pays attention to its initiatory context of meaning. The meaning of this
transgressive acts by the Buddhist saints can be grasped only by grasping its initiatory context.
1187
1188
1189

Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 283-4.

Faure, The Red Thread. Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality, 102.
Ibid., 102.

238

In Tibet also, a certain type of Buddhist saints, the siddhas, famous for their powers (siddhi),
have been called madmen (smyon-pa) because of their paradoxical, nonconventional
behaviour. There is clearly, for Faure, an analogy between them and the wild Chan masters.
Milarepa (1040-1123), the Tibetan Buddha, used to say, for instance, that he was mad with
the ecstasy of the union with the Great Seal(mahmudr). A particularly famous figure in the
history of Tibetan Buddhism is the madman of Druk, Drukpa Kunle. Although he presents
himself the mad behavior of some siddas. During the Tang, for instance, madmen flourished
in literature and art, particularly in calligraphy with the so-called mad cursive. According to
Faure, transgression thus revealed its ambivalence, which is to serve to legitimize the norm that
it transgresses, like an exception confirming the rule.1190
The surrogate victim as the transgressor restores and even establishes the order he has
somewhat transgressed in anticipation. The greatest of all delinquents is, Girard maintains,
transformed into a pillar of society.1191 Forest and wild world-renouncer can be said to be a kind
of sacred exception confirming the rule and (re-)differentiating the world order by his violent
process of transgressive undifferentiation. These radically world-renouncing Dionysian
Buddhas was mad with the ecstasy of the nondual, undifferentiating and criminal union with the
Great Seal(mahmudr).
Buddhist Dionyisan and wild world-renouncer seem to play the role of founding and
differentiating scapegoat. Representation of persecution can be founded in the sacralization of
Buddhist world-renouncer. For Girard, the worship of Saint Sebastian at the end of the Middle
Ages are generated by a much weaker version of the scapegoat mechanism and forms a a part
of the representation of persecution. Playing the role of scapegoat, he is consecrated in the
primitive double sense of cursed and blessed. Like all primitive gods, the saint protects as long
as he monopolizes and incarnates the plague. The evil aspect of this incarnation has almost
disappeared. Camparing Saint Sebastian with the persecuted Jews and doctors, Girard sees that
evil and beneficial aspects are in inverse proportion. Real persecutions and the pagan
primitive aspects of the cult of saints are unequally affected by the decomposition of mythology.
Admittedly, there, Girard argues, are traces of the survival of the primitive quality of the
sacred in the glorification of the Christian martyrs, and later in the lives of medieval saints.
The mechanisms of violence and the sacred are a part of the fascination exerted by the Christian
martyrs. But concerning the Christian understanding of the martyr, Girard has also emphasized
that the singularity of the Christian martyr is due to the fact that his sacralization fails to
take place even under conditions that are most favorable to the creation of the sacred the
crowds emotion and their religious passion for persecution. To canonize someone is not the
same as to make him sacred.1192
1190
1191
1192

Therefore the essential similarity and difference between

Ibid.,103-4.
Girard, The Scapegoat, 42.
Ibid., 60-1, 199.

239

Buddhist sacred and heroic world-renouncer and Christian saint could be postulated in terms of
a passage from the sacred to the saintly and of the transformation of heroism into
saintliness. For Girard, with Christ, a model of sainthood became a part of human history
once and for all, and superseded the model of the hero. Girard argues that trying to reconstruct a
heroic model can lead only to the worst.1193
In initiation rites, Girard argues, undifferentiation is equivalent to the loss of a previous
identity, a particularity that has now been annulled. The ritual at first emphasizes and aggravates
this loss. For Girard, it is made as complete as possible, not because of any supposed nostalgia
for the immediate, as Lvi-Strauss would say, but in order to facilitate for the initiate the
acquisition of a new identity, of a definitive differentiation. The experience of initiation offers
only a particular perspective on the mimetic crisis. The aim is to make the initiate undergo as
severe a crisis as possible so that the salutary effect of sacrifice will be released for his
benefit.1194 In the Vajrayna Buddhism, there is a form of ritual transgression that consists in
visualizing an incest.1195
Ritual incest, Girard claims, arises not from barbarous despotism, as Deleuze and Guattari
believe, nor from some structural imprint constitutive of the human mind.1196 For Girard, the
theme of incest is itself significant primarily as an extreme indicator of the loss of distinctions.
An incestuous union undermines and erases the most fundamental differences on which the
social order rests. As we have seen, ritual transgression including visualization of incest could
be best explained in the light of surrogate victim mechanism. The accusation of incest gives
symbolic expression to the process of violent undifferentiation.
Buddhist transgression is, as Faure argues, fraught with ambiguity, and in most cases it
seems condemned to remain a convenient alibi, a theoretical violation of the law that actually
reaffirms the law.1197 Such transgressive and deliberate violations must be viewed in their
broadest context: that of the overall elimination of differences. The Dionysian transgression of
the Buddhist world-renenouncer can be best explained by the mimetic reading of the sacrificial
initiation. For Girard, the most spectacular elements of initiation rites are modeled on the crisis
itself (rather than on the resolution of the crisis, as is true of most other rites). The structure of
the sacrificial crisis and of generative violence permits us to understand the means by which
violence is deflected and diffused in human society, and this in turn explains why rites of
passage can fulfill a function only as long as they maintain their character as impressive, painful,
and at times almost unendurable ordeals.1198

1193
1194
1195
1196
1197
1198

Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benot Chantre, 98-9.

Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 29.
Faure, The Red Thread. Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality, 124.
Girard, "To Double Business Bound": Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology, 111.
Faure, The Red Thread. Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality, 140.
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 284-5.

240

Some forms of ritual transgression were legitimized in particular by Buddhism in the name
of the raison dtat in the case of sexual esoteric rites performed for the emperor, or the
enthronement rites (sokui kanj) performed by him. Taking place at the time of the
enthronement, a strongly sexual symbolism was used to renew magically the fertility and
prosperity of the imperial house and the vitality of the ruler.1199 For Girard, rituals of royal
enthronement are reenactments of episodes of scapegoating which originally made the
establishment of the community possible.
The reconcilatory victim, according to Girard, appears to be the only active principle of the
whole process of crisis and resolution. Collective suggestion first isolates and accuses, then
exalts the victim, until both processes occur simultaneously. This is why the inauguration or the
renewing of a religious ordering is often attributed to the victim. Religious thought tends to
think of everything in terms of the surrogate victim, which becomes the focal point of all
meaning. The actual principles in the return to order is never perceived.1200 World-renouncing,
body-renouncing and (ontologically empty and socially dead) forest Buddhas and Bodhisattvas
as the founding victim seems to be the focal point of all meaning of Buddhis literature,
philosophy and thought. These Dionysian specialists of the violent sacred and of the reversals of
value at the festivals appears to be the active principle of the whole process of crisis
(undifferentiaton ) and resolution (differentiation). Paradoxically, empty world-renouncer
representing the Dionysian undifferentiation becomes imperial world conqueror of world order.
The antinomianism and taboo-breaking practices of tantric Buddhism has to be understood
within the initiatory context of Buddhist world-renouncing meditation. The rite described by
Abhinavagupta in chapter 29 of the Tantrloka involves a ritual process culminating in castefree sexual union of the practitioner, the siddha or vra, with his female partner in the rite, the
dt or yogi. Also involved is the consumption of wine (madya) and meat (mamsa). This then
is a classical tantric ritual of the kind which is an anathema to the orthodox and which has led to
a certain notoriety for Tantra. The male-female polarity is reiterated throughout the cosmical
hierarchy from iva and aktiat the top to material bodies at the bottom. This polarity is
open to a number of symbolic resonances such as white semen (ukra, retas, bindu) in contrast
to red blood (rakta, oita), the sun in contrast to the moon and that which emerges (udita) in
contrast to that which is tranquil (nta). We have read this Dionysian nonduality of malefemale polarity in the sense of the violently undifferentiating monstrous double. There is an
element of antinomianism here with cuts at the root of orthodox Vedic social order. This rite
flies in the face of vedic views of purity which saw all bodily products as polluting and which
tried to strictly regulate sexual relations between castes and within families. The antinomian
character of the kulaprakriy can be seen in two ways. Firstly in the ritual use of polluting
substances, namely mixed sexual
1199
1200

fluids, which

Faure, The Red Thread. Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality, 142.

Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 46, 48.

241

are offered

to the circle of

goddesses(devcakra) and the guru at the conclusion of the rite, and secondly in the flaunting
of sexual prohibitions, particularly the incest taboo. The tantric practitioner, along with the
society in which he was located, regarded sexual fluids and inter-caste sexual relations as
polluting. These initiatory taboo-breaking practices must be understood within the wider social
context in which maintenance of ritual purity was the highest factor in the scale of Brahmanical
religious values.1201 Seen from the Girardian viewpoint, this antinomianism can be understood
as the undifferentiating crimes attributed to victims (Buddhist specialists of the sacred ).
Thus one should not obscure radical discontinuities between Christian saintliness and wild
sacredness of Dionysian world-renouncer. Girard 1202 asserts that the Passion of Christ is
modeled on the folds and lines of the founding murder, and reveals to us all its workings.
What was misapprehension has become revelation. The differentiating and founding mechanism
against or around the Buddhist world-renouncing tragic heroes representing and specializing the
violent and Dionysian undifferentiation remains to be deconstructed. The wild, transgressive,
antinomian of the Buddhist tragic heroes (forest Buddhas and Bodhisattvas) can be best
comprehended in the light of sacrificial mechanism of surrogate victim.
In later Tantric sexual practices, in both Buddhist and aiva traditions, sexual practices is
used as a way of generating particular kinds of experience that are seen as conducive to the
generation of liberating insight. There is the wild, transgressive, antinomian strain in Tantra.
We have a body of ritual practices and traditions, in both Buddhist and aiva sources, that
present themselves as sophisticated and elevated means for the attainment of exalted spiritual
gols, yet contain constant reference to practices that seem deliberately transgressive and bizarre:
night-time orgies in charnel-grounds, involving the eating of human flesh.1203

5.4. World-Renouncer in a State of Prolonged Initiation

Mimetic theory resolves the apparent contradiction between the antimimetic prohibitions on
the one hand and the enactment of the mimetic crisis in ritual on the other hand. In the latter
case the crisis is not enacted for its own sake; but its purpose is to provoke the sacrificial
resolution. A paroxysm of disorder is necessary if the resolution is to occur. For Girard, rituals
and prohibitions can be seen as directed toward the same end, which is the renewed order and
peace that emerges from the victimage mechanism. It is a question of augmenting the forces of
destructive mimesis in order to channel them toward the sacrificial resolution. Girard asserts
that there is no difference in this between the so-called rites of passage and other rituals. 1204
1201
1202
1203
1204

Gavin D. Flood, Techniques of Body and Desire in Kashmir aivism, in Religion 22 (1992), 56-8.
Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benot Chantre, 120.
Samuel, The Origins of Yoga and Tantra: Indic Religions to the Thirteenth Century, 231-3.
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 29-30.

242

Girards theory on scapegoat mechanism can explain why it is that in all primitive cultures the
institutions and rituals surrounding death, marriage, hunting, child rearing, and initiation present
themselves as a mimetic crisis that concludes with the sacrifice of a victim.1205
Not only the initiatory understanding of Buddhist world-renouncing meditation, but also the
radical anthropological understanding of the ambivalent and liminal world-renouncer in a state
of prolonged initiation is necessary. In many cultures initiation into a warrior brotherhood or
shamanistic guild takes the form of an ordeal by suffering perhaps ritualised before the
transformation into the new status. Buddist world-renouncers concentration on dukkha is thus
a state of prolonged initiation, lasting until nirva is attained. The Buddha rejected physical
mortification, but in its place he put mental mortification, the contemplation of universal
suffering. World-renouncers mental mortification and sacrifice is related to the meditations
on impermanence and death. Such natural extensions of Buddhist thinking can be found with
regard to the ideas of impermanence and death, as they were developed as subjects for virtuoso
meditative reflection. Collins argues that the emphasis on dukkha, suffering or
unsatisfactoriness, in Buddhist thought was not an ampirical observation or jugdement on life,
but a form of perception undertaken as a soteriological project, 1206 which cound be
understood as a world-renouncing project and dharma of foest Buddhas.
Buddhist logic of emptiness and nothingness has little to do with the purely formal logic. It
is related to the world-renouncing and body-renouncing forest Buddhas meditations on death
and nothingness, which were specific subjects for world-renouncer. Emptiness and nothingness
was originally a soteriological project, that is to say world-renouncing project and dharma of
liminal Buddhas.
The continuous state of a renouncers internal sacrifice, according to Olivelle, assimiliates
him to a person who is initiated for a sacrifice (dkita). A man so initiated is ritually impure,
even though in the classical Vedic ritual his initiation (dk) is regarded as a purificatory rite.
He is ritually taboo; people are not allowed to eat his food, to wear his clothes, to touch him, or
even to pronounce his name. The impurity of the renouncer, whether it is related to his death
or to his sacrificial status, is also marked by various restrictions that affect his relationship to
people in the world. The renouncer is as impure as a dead man and the priests has to use the
left hand to deal with him so as not to pollute the food given to other people.1207 By contrast
with that of the initiand in tribal society, the (radically world-renouncing) Aghoris liminality
is permanent and it is also of a somewhat extreme character. It is hardly surprising, then, that
he should represent something of the equality which is generally associated with those
liminal to the routinely ordered structure.1208
World-renouncer settles down at the dk stage of sacrifice: his non-sacrifice is an
endless dk.1209 There is extensive parallelism between the act of renouncing the world of
1205
1206
1207
1208
1209

Ibid., 78.
Collins, Selfless Persons: Imagery and Thought in Theravada Buddhism, 192, 235.
Olivelle, Sanysa Upaniads: Hindu Scriptures on Asceticism and Renunciation, 93-4.
Parry, Sacrificial Death and the Necrophagous Ascetic, 99.
Malamoud, Cooking the World: Ritual and Thought in Ancient India, 47-8.

243

society, entering the ascetic life, and the initiation into the sacrifice which the sacrificer
previously had undergone.1210 The sacrifice and its elements are interpreted in terms of the
mental cult of the Brhman who renounces the world, to the extent that life is an initiation a
state of sacrificial consecration.1211
Olivelle has elucidated liminal and ambivalent status of a renouncer. The abandonment of
the sacred fire as well as the sacrificial accessories during the rite of world-renunciation
underscores the Brhmaical doctrine that renunciation is a non-ritual state that resembles
death. Although ritually dead, the world-renouncer yet continues to live physically in the world,
thereby putting himself in an ambivalent and liminal position within Brhmaism. Both his
condition of ritual death and the fact that, having deposited the sacred fires in himself, he is
engaged in a continuous sacrifice, conspire to mark the renouncer ritually impure, in spite
of the claim that he is beyond such categories. In India, people who have died recently are
believed to exist in a liminal state; such people are called preta (ghost). They are neither in this
world nor in the next. In that state they are impure and dangerous. Olivelle believes that the
liminal condition of a renouncer resembles that of a newly dead person (preta). Both are
impure and dangerous. His very physical death, it appears, eliminates the preta-like condition
he had voluntarily assumed while he lived as a renouncer. The world-renouncer is as impure
as a dead man and the priests has to use the left hand to deal with him so as not to pollute the
food given to other people.1212
Thus much ambiguity of Buddhist logic seem to be related to the liminal, ambivalent and
forest specific existence of wild Buddhas. Sacred world-renouncer as a reconciliatory victim
represents a socially marginal and liminal being. The surrogate victim constitutes both a link
and a barrier between the community and the sacred. To even so much as represent this
extraordinary victim the ritual victim must belong both to the community and to the sacred.
Ritual victims tend to be drawn from categories that are neither outside nor inside the
community, but marginal to it: slaves, children, livestock. This marginal quality is crucial to the
proper functioning of the sacrifice.1213
Therefore, as Collins1214 maintains, to see life as suffering represents not an empiricially
derived judgement on life, but a goal-oriented soteriological project (of forest world-renouncer).
World-renouncers meditation on suffering (dukkha) can be seen also as a result of evil deeds in
previous lives. The Buddha describes twelve previous lives in which he performed evil deeds,
and states that these deeds resulted in great suffering throughout aeons of transmigration and
finally resulted in the unpleasant aspects of the Buddha biography. The two draws clear causal
connections between the previous evil deed and later suffering. Thus the Buddha begins by
stating that in a former life he was a scoundrel named Munli, who slandered an innocent
1210

Collins, Selfless Persons: Imagery and Thought in Theravada Buddhism, 63.

J.L. Brockington, The Sacred Thread. Hinduism in its Continuity and Diversity (Edingburgh: Edinburgh
University Press, 1981), 53.
1212
Olivelle, Sanysa Upaniads: Hindu Scriptures on Asceticism and Renunciation, 92-4.
1213
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 271.
1214
Collins, Selfless Persons: Imagery and Thought in Theravada Buddhism, 192.
1211

244

Paccekabuddha named Surabhi. As a result of that deed (tena kammavipkena) he transmigrated

in hell (niraye) for a long time, experiencing thousands of years of dukkha.1215 Later I will
attempt to analye these causal connections between the bad karma of the Buddha and later
sufferings in the light of the mechanism of mimetic reconciliation polarized around the victim.

5.5. Kan : Poison against Poison

Girards concept of a sacrificial crisis may be useful in clarifying not only certain aspects of
Greek tragedy, but also the antilogical, the Dionysian and transgression of Buddhas,
Bodhisattvas and Buddhist saints. Faure understood a kan as being like a dharani, a conjuring
of the ultimate reality into the ritual space established by the act of meditation.1216 A illogical
and nonrational kan, in Girardian thinking, might be considered as a simulating or reproducing
the undifferentiated and the logical crisis. The quintessential expression of Zen awakening, the
kan, is, for Sharf, construed as an illogical or nonrational riddle designed to bring about a
realization of the eternal present.1217 In almost all of the koan, its striking characteristics are
the illogical (das Unlogische) and the absurdity of the act or words.1218
A poision to counter poison or a thorn to remove a thorn, this is a characterization often
applied to the function of kans.1219 For deliberate reality confusion, Kan was used.1220 We
can interpret this poisonous kan as a kind of illogical, antilogical and therefore
undifferentiating simulation of mimetic crisis including logical and linguistic crisis within the
initiatory context of Buddhist meditation. D. T. Suzuki toyed with the paradoxical character of
koans and marveled at their extreme irrationality all his life. The illogical nature of the koan
resists logical solution. Suzukis early essays give a psychological description of this process in
terms of accumulation, saturation, and explosion. Such terms present a picture of psychic
violence in the koan exercise (psychisch Gewaltsamen des Koan-Bemhens). As a matter of
fact, the number of accounts, both contemporary and old, that describe an explosive occurrence
in the mind as a result of an intense struggle with the koan is not few.1221 This

violent process

of accumulation, saturation, and explosion in Buddhist meditation can be interpreted in the

sense of simulacre de crise.1222
1215

Walters, The Buddha's Bad Karma: A Problem in the History of Theravada Buddhism, 76.
Faure, Visions of Power. Imagining Medieval Japanese Buddhism, 216.
1217
Robert H. Sharf, The Zen of Japanese nationalism, in Curators of the Buddha: The Study of Buddhism Under
Colonialism, Donald S. Lopez, Jr., ed (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1995), 107.
1218
Dumoulin, Zen: Geschichte und Gestalt, 134.
1219
Heine, Putting the Fox Back in the Wild Fox Kan: The Intersection of Philosophical and Popular Religious
Elements in the Chan/Zen Kan Tradition, 301.
1220
Enomiya-Lasalle, Zen-Buddhismus , 201.
1221
Dumoulin, Der Erleuchtungsweg des Zen im Buddhismus, 85.
1222
Girard, Le sacrifice, 27.
1216

245

According to Faure, Suzuki attempted to show that Zen was neither illogical nor antiintellectual, but that is had its own type of logic, stemming from pure experience and differing
from (or indifferent to) the dichotomous logic of Western philosophy. Suzukis nonAristotelian logic is considered as the only correct way to express the pure and nonrational
experience of Zen and to lead one back to it.1223
This so-called Buddhist non-Aristotelian logic has to be understood as the festive,
Dionysian and undifferentiating logic of the world-renouncing specialist of the sacred in a
liminal existence of prolonged initiation and within the specific context of meditative initiation.
The negation of language in Zen is thought to be attempted in nonlinguistic ways, through
skillful means (upya) and body language (blows, shouts, gestures, facial expressions) or
some kind of qualified or paradoxical silence. 1224 This negation of language seems to
represent a linguistic crisis.
Mimetic crisis precedes a scapegoat phenomenon. The ritualistic imitation deals first with
the sacrificial crisis itself, with the chaotic antecedents to the unanimous resolution. For Girard,
all the mock battles that generally take place prior to sacrificial ceremonies and all the ritual
dances whose formal symmetry is reflected in a perpetual confrontation between the performers
lend themselves to an interpretation in which the performances are seen as imitative responses
to a sacrificial crisis.1225 Verbal contest (brahamodya and kan) within the context of the
agonistic conception of sacrifice can be interpreted as a simulation of sacrificial crisis
preceding a scapegoat phenomenon. Heesterman pays attention to a particular form of the verbal
contest: the reviling of sacrifice and its mythical representative, Prajpati. Though the brhmaa
texts consider the blame to refer to faults in the execution of the liturgy and ritual procedure, the
revilers utterance refer to acts of violence. On that day Prajpati, the mythical personification
of sacrifice, is to be ceremonially reviled. Though this abuse, which consists either in verses
mentioning the bad things he created or relating the well-known tale of Prajpatis primordial
incest, is not given as a dialogue, it follows immediately on, or is even a part of, the brahmodya
at the end of the tenth day.1226
In many myths, these crimes of sex and/of violence within the family are the sole cause of
the tragic heros punishment. Prajapati, for instance, the Indian god of sacrifice, has committed
incest with one of his daughters, and the gods, his children, unanimously decide he must be put
to death.1227 According to Girard, the Brahmanas charge Prajpati with the very crime, a crime
ready-made to justify a lynching in the eyes of an archaic or backward mob: incest. Like

1223

Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights. An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition, 68-9.
Ibid., 198.
1225
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 97.
1226
Heesterman, The Inner Conflict of Tradition. Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society, 75-6.
1227
Girard in: Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly (ed), Violent Origins. Walter Burkert, Ren Girard, and Jonathan Z. Smith
on Ritual Killing and Cultural Formation (Standford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 83-4.
1224

246

Oedipus, like all divinities, Prajpatis crime is not without extenuatiing circumstances, but they
are not the same as those of Sophocles hero. The god cannot become sexually active without
making himself guilty of incest, since he is the father of all creatures without exception. When
he makes love to the goddess Aurore, his daughter, all the other creatures are scandalized and
decideunanimously, of courseto put him to death. It is the unanimity of the first lynching.
The collective dimension is here, but the execution of the sentence is entrusted to a single god,
the most cruel and sinister of Vedic gods, Rudra.1228

5.6. Fox/ Bodhisattva/ Scapegoat in the Wild Fox Kan

We have interpreted the verbal contest as a kind of simulated mimetic crisis preceding the
accusation against the surrogate victim (Prajpatis incest in the case of the verbal contest
brahmodya). Based on Heines article Putting the Fox Back in the Wild Fox Kan: The
Intersection of Philosophical and Popular Religious Elements in the Chan/Zen Kan Tradition
and through the close reading of this Wild Fox kan in the light of mimetic theory, we can
also find these themes of verban contest simulating sacrificial crisis, accusations against the
surrogate victim and sacrificial resolution. Wild Fox Kan playing

a crucial role in both

Rinzai and St Zen interpretive traditions, concerns a Buddhist monk in a mountain monastery
who confesses that he is really a non -human (C. fei-jen, J. hinin ). He admits that he has
been transfigured into a wild fox spirit (C. yeh-hu ching, J. yako-zei) for five hundred lifetimes
as retribution for presuming that enlightenment is beyond the otherwise inescapable effects of
karmic causality. The fox/monk is eventually released from the punishment when master Paichang (749-814) utters a succinct, transformative turning word (C. i-chuan-y, J. ittengo) that
affirms the inviolability of karma, and his fox corpse is subsequently found by Pai-chang under
a massive rock on the far side of the mountain and buried with clerical rites. In the kan, the
term wild fox is used merely as a rhetorical device indicating the unenlightenment of the ancient
monk which is overcome by a correct understanding of karma.1229
The core of the kan consists of a typical Zen encounter dialogue (Ch. Chi-yan wen-ta, J.
kien-mond), a spontaneous repartee in which a master uses sparse and often inscrutable or
nonsensical words to trigger a liberation from conceptual fixation in his disciple.1230 These
nonsensical words can be seen as a re-enactment of crisis to trigger sacrificial resolution. The
victimage mechanism can only be triggered by the frenetic paroxysm of the crisis. This
nonsensical words also could be understood as a kind of linguistic transgression. The radical
1228
1229
1230

Girard, Le sacrifice, 41-2.

Heine, Putting the Fox Back in the Wild Fox Kan, 258.
Ibid., 258.

247

world-renouncer is generally gluttonous and characterized by loud malicious laughter. All

these traits are synonyms insofar as they signify transgression through parallel codes like the
sexual, linguistic, animal, moral, alimentary, and aesthetic. Contrary, nonsensical or obscene
speech and cocophonous sounds universally signify transgression.

1231

This transgressive

sacrality represented by radical forest world-renouncer could be re-read in the light of Girards
surrogate victim mechanism.
According to Heine, although the commentaries generally tried to distance themselves from
the mythological roots of Zen discourse by defusing or reorienting any foucs on the reality or
unreality of folk beliefs in favor of the rhetoric of abbreviation and iconoclasm, in many kan
cases supernatural themes provide a necessary narrative background.1232 The textual paradox is
that, in verbally denying causality, the old monk is victimized by karma and must endlessly
suffer its effects, yet in Pai-changs affirming the impact of causality the monk finally gains
release. 1233 According to Tambiah, with regard to the hagiography of the saints in early
Buddhism, some stereotyped themes can be extracted. The Buddhist saint is destined to a
prolonged life of activity in this world, and this long presence is featured as a retribution for
some evil karmic acts in the past. His committing an evil act condemns him to a long period of
life on earth.1234
Long ago, as a master of the same temple in a previous lifetime in the age of Kyapa, the
penultimate (and final prehistoric) of the seven primordial Buddhas culminating in kyamuni,
he denied the basic Buddhist doctrine of the inviolability of cause-and-effect. 1235 His
transgressive denial of the basic Buddhist doctrine can be read as the crime attributed to victim.
Undifferentiating crimes and stereotypical accusations attributed to victims seem to be
fundamental. They attack the very foundation of cultural order, the family and the hierarchical
differences without which there would be no social order. 1236 A mysterious old man has been
attending sermons every evening with the assembly of monks on Mt. Pai-chang. One day after
everyone has departed he stays behind and informs the master of the monastery that he is a
non-human suffering five hundred fox transmigrations.1237
According to the Vinaya, there was perplexing criterion: candicates for ordination had to be
humans. In ancient India, where belief in the ability of deities, dead spirits, and supernatural
beings of various sorts to take on human form was widespread, this rule made good sense, and
to this day, in South and Southeast Asia, candidates are routinely asked, as part of the ritual
preliminaries for higher ordination, the intriguing questionAre you a human being?. In the

1231
1232
1233
1234
1235
1236
1237

Chalier-Visuvalingam, Bhairavas Royal Brahmanicide: The Problem of the Mahbrhma a, 170.

Heine, Putting the Fox Back in the Wild Fox Kan, 294.
Ibid., 283.
Tambiah, The Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets, 23.
Heine, Putting the Fox Back in the Wild Fox Kan, 269.
Girard, The Scapegoat, 15.
Heine, Putting the Fox Back in the Wild Fox Kan, 269.

248

following story, the legendary reasons for that question is set out: it is the tale of a nga (snake
divinity) who managed to join the monastic order and live as a monk until it was discovered that
he was not human being. He was then expelled from the community. Ironically and interestingly,
in commemoration of this snakes intense desire to become a monk, and perhaps also to
symbolize their liminal status, candidates for Buddhist ordination are still today referred to as
nggas.1238
According to Heine, the kan narrative bears a striking morphological affinity with folklore
tales in medieval China and Japan dealing with the exploits of shapeshifting, trickster foxes
who seduce or possess unsuspecting victims and can only be eliminated by ritual exorcism.1239
In some morality tales involving clerics, Mara-like foxes seduce virtuous priests, or priests who
are overly virtuous are suspected of being foxes in disguise. In other tales, bodhisattva take the
form of foxes which function as catalysts leading people to the verge of a breakthrough.1240
The positive and negative uses of the term wild fox in a philosophical context are mirrored by
bivalency in folklore images of the fox as both good and evil. The fox as a trickster figure like
other shapeshifting animals, particularly snakes, is an ambiguous symbol. 1241 The main
meaning that emerges from the folklore constructions is that the fox as a creature poised
seductively in the twilight represents a crossing of permeable boundaries, a doorway into a
realm of liminality. 1242 The ambiguous social status of Chan masters as cultural
intermediaries1243 also can be best explained by the mimetic theory.
The logical ambiguity of Buddhist logics (for example paradoxical logic of nonduality) has
to be thought of as related to the ambiguous social status of world-renouncer. The double
transference of the primitive sacred, Girard argues, explains the logical flaw that
characterizes numerous myths. In the beginning of the latter the hero passes for a dangerous
criminal and nothing more. This same scapegoat appears in the conclusion as the divine savior,
though this change of identity is never justified or even pointed out. At the end of these myths
the criminals of the beginning, now duly divinized, preside at the reconstruction of the cultural
system they seem to have destroyed in the initial phase when they were the object of hostile
projections, when they were only scapegoats.1244
These

liminal,

ambivalent

and

ambiguous

figures

(wild

fox/trickster/Buddha/bodhisattva/Buddhist monk) seem to stand for the surrogate victim. The

victim is the source of ambivalence for the members of the newborn community.1245 The victim
appears to be simultaneously good and evil, peaceable and violent, a life that brings death and a
1238
1239
1240
1241
1242
1243
1244
1245

Strong, The Experience of Buddhism: Sources and Interpretations, 61.

Heine, Putting the Fox Back in the Wild Fox Kan, 259.
Ibid., 298.
Ibid., 278.
Ibid., 282.
Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy. A Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism, 39.
Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 72.
McKenna, Violence and Difference. Girard, Derrida, and Deconstruction, 79.

249

death that guarantees life. In this sense the victim does seem to constitute a universal
signifier. 1246 Either a person is changed into a fox as punishment or as a bodhisattvas
compassionate choice.1247 While ther term fox generally represents a misguided egoism or even
antinomianism, it can also stand for genuine freedom from all restrictions and therefore
signify a buddha.1248 From a Girardian perspective, this antinomian and transgressive wild fox
can be seen to signify a buddha as the surrogate victim. One could be led either to the path of
Buddha or to its opposite, the path of Mara, which is paradoxically identified with Buddha, as
suggested in the Vimalakirti Stra passage, If the bodhisattva treads the wrong ways he enters
the Buddha path, or Ikkys famous saying that it is more difficult to enter the realm of Mara
than the realm of Buddha.1249
Kans, Heine asserts, store supernaturalism in a muted structure while the main structure
forefronts a paradoxical perspective of critical transcendence collapsing all dualities.1250 We
have already interpreted this paradoxical perspective of Buddhist transgression undifferentiating
all dualities in the sense of sacrificial crisis simulated within the contex of Buddhist initiation.
In the liminal realm between worlds, the conventional distinctions between reality and illusion,
Buddha and Mara, freedom and bondage, life and death, and purity and defilement are mixed
and merged in confounding ways that must be confronted as a gateless gate (C. wu-men-kuan,
J. mumokan) to attain salvation. 1251 In other Mahyna and Vajrayna contexts, even the
dichotomy between purity and defilements is transcended at the level of Buddhahood.1252 The
fundamental difference between purity and defilements is transgressed and undifferentiated at
the level of Buddhahood. World-renouncing Buddhas as the victim represent the violent
undifferentiation of fundamental difference between purity and defilements.
The same text also comments that (Buddhist world-renouncer) Pai-chang and Huang-po
roam fearlessly like kings of the jungle, so they can certainly live in a foxhole.1253 In more
recent times Lin-chi, Te-shan, and many other Zen masters would have suffered through
hundreds of thousands of wild fox rebirths. One possibility of interpretation is that the former
Pai-chang transfigured as a bodhisattva-like mission, but this, for Heine, conflicts with the
statement that he has been punished.1254 Girards theory can explain this violent paradox around
the wild fox/bodhisattva who has been punished.
The current Pai-chang responds by pronouncing an affirmation of cause-and-effect. The
1246

Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 102.

Heine, Putting the Fox Back in the Wild Fox Kan, 303.
1248
Ibid., 277.
1249
Charles Luk, trans., The Vimalakirti Nirdesa Stra (Berkeley: Shambala, 1972), 81 (cited in Heine, Putting the
Fox Back in the Wild Fox Kan, 289.
1250
Ibid., 294.
1251
Ibid., 281-2.
1252
Reynolds and Hallisey, The Buddha, 47.
1253
Heine, Putting the Fox Back in the Wild Fox Kan, 276.
1254
Ibid., 284, 288.
1247

250

former Pai-chang, on hearing that there is no escpae from karma, is thus liberated from his
karmic punishment by the current Pai-chang. Now enlightened the old man dies and his fox
body discovered under the rock is properly cremated and buried, according to his last request,
with a priests funeral. The ceremony at first confuses the other monks because no one had been
sick in the infirmary and only Pai-chang had been aware of the non-humans existence (Heine
1996, 270). This Buddhist story about mysterious old man who is victimized by karma could be
well explained by Girards hypothesis of victimization. His hypothesis on ordering principle
allows the texts to emerge from the silence that surrounds them and frees them from the
metaphysical and moral trap that prohibits their interpretation.1255

5.7. Buddhist Logic of Radical Elimination

In Wild Fox Kan, we can see the schema of the mimetic crisis simulated by verbal
contest within the initiatory context of Buddhist meditation, a violent destructuring that releases
the founding mechanism and founding murder. Eliminating the fox-as-unenlightenment
results in the attainment of nirva.1256 Under the title The Radical Elimination, Girard1257
has dealt with analyses in the work of Lvi-Strauss that concern the founding murder, that
reveal the principal strucutrual traits involved, without demonstrating any awareness of what is
being shown or any understanding of the fact that they are in the process of revealing the
generative mechanism of all mythology.1258
Girard acknowledges a discovery that Lvi-Strauss has made in recognizing in the myth a
movement from undifferentiaton to differentiation. But in the linquistic perspective of LviStrauss, the undifferentiated or the continuum, for Girard, is nothing but a patching over of
distinctions that have already been made in language, and thus constitutes a deception whose
presence the ethnologists comes to deplore, particularly in ritual, because he sees in it a perverse
refusal of differential thought. Lvi-Strauss notes that there are several common points that
should be emphasized in the Ojibwa and Tikopia myths. For Girard, in a purely logical manner,
Lvi-Strauss has discovered a logic of exclusion and elimination in these myths.1259
As already noted, a sacrificial logic of exclusion and elimination can be found in the
Buddhist logic of (world-renouncing) nothingness, emptiness and no-self represented by the
forest world-renouncer. Buddhist world-renouncers logic of world-renouncing nothingess and
Dionyisan nonduality has to be reread from the viewpoint of the mystified logic of exclusion,
expulsion and elimination. In Wild Fox Kan, we can observe the transfigured account of a
1255
1256
1257
1258
1259

Girard, Job: The Victim of His People, 30.

Heine, Putting the Fox Back in the Wild Fox Kan, 273.
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 105-12.
Ibid., 105.
Ibid., 108-9.

251

real violence. A print from Sengais famous collection on the Wu-men-kuan which illustrates the
discovery of the fox corpse, a scene which is also depicted by numerous modern Zen masters in
informal drawings that accompany kan commentaries. The poem, according to the translation
by Norman Waddell, reads: Not falling into cause and effect can bring the wild fox to life;/ not
obscuring cause and effect kills him stone dead/If you still dont understand/ why dont you
go to the foot of the north cliff and take a look at him.1260
According to Girard, in Lvi-Strausss interpreation, terms such as removal, destruction, and
radical elimination return constantly but never refer to real violence done to a real individual. In
Lvi-Strausss perspective, then, the radical elimination of one or of several fragments the
expulsion of a god, the destruction of living beings or of particular foods never amounts to
anything more than various solutions to resolve the problem of the transition from continuous to
discrete quantities. With its emphasis on difference, structuralism necessarily sees things in
terms of spacing, so that according to Lvi-Strauss, mythic thought, with its invention of
fantastic stories, is attempting simply to spatialize difference, to represent metaphorically the
process of differentiation.1261 In this book, I attempt to interpret Buddhist logics such as logic of
nothingness or emptiness not in a purely logical manner, but sacrificially from the viewpoint of
the mimetic mechanism of violent reconciliation
Because of the polysemy of wild fox Zen reflecting an ambivalent, duplicitous attitude
or perhaps a deliberately crafted bivalency the main structure and the muted structure of the
kan, according to Heine, are each a reservoir containing the full range of meaning of the
opposite side with which it is often conflated or even camouflaged. One level of
polysemy within philosophical discourse is that, by an inversionary method in which insults
such as bed-wetting devil or red-beared barbarian become expression of praise, wild fox
can function as a symbol of wisdom or detachment. Zen is well known for tis distingenous
blasphemy, even toward its most venerated leaders and rites, which functions as apoison to
counteract poision.1262 As noted earlier, this violent reciprocity between the masters and the
novices that could include slapping or other violent forms can be understood as a sacrificial
crisis in initiatory context. Also in Greek tragedy violence invariably effaces the differences
between antagonists. The more a tragic conflict is prolonged, the more likely it is to culminate
in a violent mimesis; the resemblance between the combatants grows ever stronger unti each
presents a mirror image of the other. For Girard, this scandalous effacement of distinctions is
apparent in Euripides Alcestis. Father and son are engaged in a tragic dialogue.1263
The meaning of the kan in most cases are deliberately open-ended, quixotic, or even
absurd.1264 This nonsensical, absurd and open-ended meaning of kan is reminiscent of the
verbal contest (brahmodya) mentioned above. An objective solution is not aimed at. The pivotal
1260
1261
1262
1263
1264

Heine, Putting the Fox Back in the Wild Fox Kan, 271.
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 111.
Heine, Putting the Fox Back in the Wild Fox Kan, 276-7.
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 47.
Heine, Putting the Fox Back in the Wild Fox Kan, 283.

252

concern in brahmodya is the antithetical complementarity. It is a concrete (verbal) contest

between opposite parties. The parties are locked together in agonistic complementarity.
Consequently, the contest must ever renewed. No objective solution is strived for, but an everalternating, personal outcome.1265 The traces of this violent verbal contest, game and reciprocity
between two opposite parties in its agnostic complementarity can be found in Buddhist kan.
The reviler does not reject sacrifice as a matter of abstract doctrine, otherwise his participation
would be inexplicable. What he does reject is his opponents sacrifice. His is not a religious
dotrine but a ritual role in the contest, which calls for his wholehearted participation in the hope
of reversing the roles.1266
In Greek tragedy, the process of violent reciprocity engulfs the whole. Girard defines the
sacrificial crisis as a crisis of distinctions that is, a crisis affecting the cultural order. This
cultural order is nothing more than a regulated system of distinctions in which the differences
among individuals are used to establish their identity and their mutual relationships. The hidden
violence of the sacrificial crisis eventually succeeds in destroying distinctions, and this
destruction in turn fuels the renewed violence. 1267 For Girard, the Greek tragedians were
concerned with the destruction of a cultural order. The violent reciprocity that engulfs their
characters is a manifestation of this destructive process. The ritualistic crisis the abolition of
all distinctions plays the vital role in the formation of Greek tragedy.1268 Also the initiatory
simulation of ritualistic crisis seems to play the important role in Buddhist tragic dialog (kan).
Not only a tragic confrontation in classical drama of Greek tragedy, but also Buddhist tragic
confrontation of kan seems to stand for the violent reciprocity, mimetic doubles and sacrificial
crisis.
Double transference on to the victim can explain these insults against its most venerated
Buddhist leaders that become expression of praise by an inversion. Because of the two
transferences the victim becomes the source for a partically limitless range of significations. For
Girard, religious thought is incapable of encompassing or of extricating itself from such a
polysemous abundance.1269 The polysemy of the term wild fox spirit is used on diverse,
dispersed levels reflecting the dialectical tensions between the interlocking rhetorical
perspectives of the mythological/supernatural and the philosophical/anti-supernatural.1270
Girard argues that the representation is determined by the violent reconciliation and the
resulting sacralization. The victim is thus represented with all the attributes and qualities of the
sacred. The myth will sometimes represent the victim as a visitor from the outside, sometimes
as a member of the community. The victim is a matrix of meaning. The victim can appear to
be foreign or native because it seems to move constantly from the outside to the inside and from
1265
1266
1267
1268
1269
1270

Heesterman, The Inner Conflict of Tradition. Essays in Indian Ritual, Kingship, and Society, 79-80.
Ibid., 77.
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 49.
Ibid., 55.
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 50.
Heine, Putting the Fox Back in the Wild Fox Kan, 267.

253

the inside to the outside in accomplishing its role of saving and refounding the community.1271
A mysterious old man/fox as a visitor from the outside was killed and then sacralized.
According to Heine, an interesting twist in the Tsung-jung lu commentary derives from a
word association found in a variety of sources based on the homophone between fox and
barbarian , which are pronounced hu in Chinese or ko in Japanese and which are both used to
stigmatize marginal persons. This text rewrites the concluding sentence of the kan as I
thought foxes were red-bearded, but here is another red-beared fox. As Heine asserts, this wild
fox koan should be interpreted in terms of the broader mythological context in which it is
uttered, a context which presupposes the reality of premodern supernaturalism. Here, the fox
represents the dual possibilities of protection and deception, redemption and betrayal. Foxes,
especially in Japan and to a lesser extent also in China, are deified and enshrined as protectors
or divine messengers as well as demonized as deceivers.1272
We would therefore see the negative qualifications such as fox as nothing but an accusation
made against the victim. The negative connotation of the eliminated fragement, the positive
connotation given to the elimination itself, which is generally presented as a collective
expulsion. For Girard the radical elimination is collective violence and that violence is justified
by some misdeed or flaw attributed to the victimized fragment.1273 There is also the negative
connotation of the eliminated fragement: world-renouncers nothingness and voidness. The
positive connotation given to the elimination itself in Buddhism, for example Buddhist
sacralization or mystification of world-renouncers logic and dharma of sacrificial nothingness
should be grasped in the light of collective expulsion. In Buddhist radical elimination (Buddhist
world-renouncing logic of nothingness), we can detect the founding mechanism of collective
violence.
According to Heine, there are two levels of bivalency: the level of the fox image
representing the dual possibilities of protection and deception, redemption and betrayal, good
and evil; and the level of the Buddhist approach which is both for and against, assimilative and
purificatory of and by the fox. Therefore, the phrase wild fox harboring a double structure
encompasses multiple levels, including metaphyiscal paradox, in which the negative
implications outweigh but are ultimately equalized with the positive, and mythical bivalency,
in which positively and negatively coexist with the former transforming the latter. The term also
contains an inverted structure when it is evoked in a positive way that overrides the derisive
implications as in praise of someones spiritual freedom or wildness: a reverse structure in
that apparent heores Pai-chang and Haung-po become the object of criticism rather than
admiration so that negativity prevails.1274

1271
1272
1273
1274

Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 110-1.

Heine, Putting the Fox Back in the Wild Fox Kan, 277-9.
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 113, 115.
Heine, Putting the Fox Back in the Wild Fox Kan, 313-4.

254

This accusation against Buddhist heroes in kan is comparable to and reminiscent of the
case of mythical prototype Prajpati who is abused in brahmodhya (the enigma exchanges
forming an essential part of the Vedic sacrificial cult. Though this abuse, which consists either
in verses mentioning the bad things he created or in the well-known incest theme, is not given
as a dialogue, it follows immediately on or is even a part of the brahmodya at the end of the last
day of the ten-day sacrificial period. For Heesterman, the mystery of origins in the
contradictory form of the primordial incest would seem to be a fitting theme of the
brahmodhya.1275 In Girardian thinking, articulated language and the exchange of words, like
all other kinds of exchange, must have its basis in ritual, in the screams and cries that
accompanied the mimetic crisis and that must be reproduced by ritual because they precede and
perhaps condition that reconciliatory immolation.1276
In the enigma exchanges (brahmodya), an enigmatic question produces oblique and often
equally enigmatic responses based on precisely the type of correspondences and identifications
(bandhu). Above all, the brahmodya seeks the conflation or superimposition of distinct
domains by establishing an esoteric identity between seemingly disparate items horse and
bird, ocean and sky, father and son.1277 This verbal and logical conflation of distinct domains
(differences) could be interpreted as a kind of Girardian undifferentiation (see warring
conflations of opposites). 1278 Given the general drive toward conflating levels, it is,
according to Schulman,1279 perhaps not surprising that incest (on the mythic level) is a recurrent
topic for the Vedic enigmas. This logical and verbal undifferentiation and crisis seems to
represent the mimetic crisis or crisis of distinctions before the sacrificial resolution. For Girard,
this crisis of distinctions and degree is also everywhere in Shakespeare and is suggested in
countless different ways. In Shakespeare, it always alludes to the interplay of the mimetic
doubles and the breakdown of some distinction. One of the commonest signs of Shakespearean
undifferentiation is, according to Girard, a quasi-impressionistic fusion of sea and sky, the
literal melting of the one into the other, as in Othello.1280
Girards theory is helpful for making sense of this metaphysical paradox and mythical
bivalency around the polysemic wild fox/Buddhist heores/bodhisattva/Buddha/reconciliatory
victim. For Girard, the sacred is the sum of human assumptions resulting from collective
transferences focused on a reconciliatory victim at the conclusion of a mimetic crisis.1281 The
wild fox is at once assimilated and stigmatized. Thus, an exorcism of the interior snake or

1275

Heesterman, "The Origin of the Nstika," 179.

Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 103.
1277
David Shulman, The Hungry God. Hindu Tales of Filicide and Devotion (Chicago and London: The University
of Chicago Press, 1993), 97.
1278
Girard, A Theatre of Envy: William Shakespeare, 58.
1279
Shulman, The Hungry God. Hindu Tales of Filicide and Devotion, 97.
1280
Girard, A Theatre of Envy: William Shakespeare, 179.
1281
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 42.
1276

255

fox is not merely an external ritual but functions as a thorn to remove a thorn, or a poision to
counter poison a characterization often applied to the function of kans.1282
The development of founding ancestors and titulary divinities result from double
transference on to the surrogate victim. The appearance of the fox is associated with the onset of
a moral crisis and its vanguishing or disappearance represents the removal of delusion.1283
Lvi-Strauss equates victims with (eliminated) fragments, their death with logical
elimination, and the effects of that death with the transition from the continuous to the
discontinuous.

1284

Disappearance of wild fox/Buddhist heores/bodhisattva/Buddha

representing the removal of delusion can be equated with a sacrificial death of reconcilatory
victim.
Transgressive denial of the basic Buddhist doctrine of the universality of karmic
causality by a mysterious old man/non-human/fox can be interpreted in terms of the
undifferentiating crimes of reconciliatory victim. In verbally denying this causality, the old
monk is victimized by karma and must endlessly suffer its effects, yet in Pai-changs
affirming the impact of causality the monk finally gains release.1285 In Japan claims of people
being possessed by a fox (kitsune-tsuki) are so frequently reported even today, especially in
some regions such as Izumo or among certain populations sectors, that it is considered a
culture-bound psycho-spiritual disorder. At times there seems to be a socio-political
significance to reports of fox possession and fox sorcery when, for example, a particular group
(i.e., nouveau riche) are targeted for stigmatization.1286
Girard challenges us to identify traces of the violent sacred in the Buddhist kan. Examining
the parallel drawn between Indian-Buddhist verbal contest (brahamodya and kan) and
stiomythia in Greek tragedy, we have illucidated the polysemic character of the founding
mechanism around the liminal world-renouncer. In the Buddhist kan, we have observed the
violent elimination of differences between the antagonists, tragic relationships and the
symmetrical quality of verbal contest and dialogue.1287 Thus, the concept of a sacrificial crisis
may be useful in clarifying not only certain aspects of Greek tragedy, but also some Buddhist,
or more exactly world-renouncing logics and values.

6. World-Renouncer as Slayer of Distinctions

1282
1283
1284
1285
1286
1287

Heine, Putting the Fox Back in the Wild Fox Kan, 301.
Ibid., 282.
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 124.
Heine, Putting the Fox Back in the Wild Fox Kan, 283.
Ibid., 305, n. 112.
See Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 72.

256

6.1. iva, Dionysos and the Victim

The reconciliatory victim as a criminal strikes at the most fundamental, essential, and
inviolable distinction within the group. He becomes, literally, the slayer of distinctions.1288
The Dionysian and yogic world-renouncer can be defined as a slayer of distinctions. The yogic
world-renouncer is a slayer of world orders distinctions. As we saw earlier, there are structural
parallels in the character and cult of Indian iva and Greek Dionysos.1289 Indian iva and
Greek Dionysos as reconciliatory victims represent concidentia oppositorum,1290 in Girardian
thinking violent undifferentiation. Dionysos, like iva is a composite of many contraries in
appearance and in personality.1291 They appear as benevolent liberators, then as terrifying
daemons. iva, despite the erect phallus, is himself the great Yogin, and patron of ascetics. iva
remains a mysterium tremendum et fascinosum: he terrifies and he fascinates. He subsumes
the violence of the contradictions into himself .1292
Patricide and incest serve the same purpose here as do twins in many primitive religions.
For Girard, the crimes of Oedipus signify the abolishment of differences, but because the
nondifference is attributed to a particular individual, it is transformed into a new distinction,
signifying the monstrosity of Oedipuss situation. The nondifference became the responsibility,
not of society at large, but of a single individual.1293 Based on the social-anthropological
concept explication of Buddhist nondual concept, we know that the yogic philosophy of
nonduality signifies the Dionysian abolishment of differences specialized and represented by the
liminal world-renouncer. The nondifference is attributed to a particular individual, to a specialist
of the sacred.
By using some of the insights of the controversial French thinker and a sort of self-styled
pagan mystic, Georges Bataille, Urban suggests a way of approaching the aivite sect of
Kplikas or skull bearers who are notorious for ist transgressive sexual and sacrificial practices
and therefore have long been misunderstood. 1294 But I wish to argue that Girards theory on the
mechanism of reconcilatory victim can offer better insights into the myths and practices of the
Kplikas, and specifically, into this relationship between sacrificial violence and sexual
transgression and into the dialectic between taboo and transgression. The Kplikas who were
deliberately playing upon the dangerous, transgressive power on the margins of the social order,
seems to play the role of the reconcilatory victim. Their highly ambivalent oscillation between
strict asceticism and violent hedonism, between austere acts of penance and transgressive acts of
human sacrifice and ritual sex with outcastes need to be understood in the context of the
1288

Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 74.

Long, iva and Dionysos Versions of Terror and Bliss, 184.
1290
See III. Concidentia Oppositorum in Siva and Dionysos (ibid., 207-8).
1291
Ibid., 193.
1292
R.C. Zaehner, Hinduism (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1966), 86.
1293
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 76.
1294
Urban, The Remnants of Desire: Sacrificial Violence and Sexual Transgression in the Cult of the Kplikas and
in the Writings of Georges Bataille, 67-90.
1289

257

surrogate victim mechanism.1295

Mythologically, the Kplikas trace their own origins to the deity iva, and specifically to
myths of iva as Kaplin or the skull-bearer. In some Puric versions of the myth, it is said that
the creator god, Brahm, made some insulting remarks about iva; in other variants, it is said
that Brahms crime was actually incest with his own daughter.1296 But in either case, iva (or
his wrathful incarnation, Bhairava) promptly cut off one of Brahms five heads, and was then
punished to wander over the earth with the skull fastened to his hand as his begging bowl, thus
defying all the strict Hindu ordinance of purity and impurity,1297until the skull finally fell off at
the sacred site of Kaplamocana in Banaras. Rudra-iva, from the very earliest texts, is the god
of punishment, who violates the law of society and the ritual in order to set it aright again, that
is to say the reconcilatory victim in Girardian sense.
Two crimes of Oedipus (parricide and the incest) that are supposed to contaminate the entire
city, Girard claims, obviously signify the dissolving of even the most elemental cultural
differences, those between father, mother, and child. The parricide and the incest represents the
quintessence of the whole crisis, its most logical crystalization in the context of a
scapegoating project, that is, of an attempt to make that crisis look like the responsibility of a
single individual.1298 iva is a Kplika an impure abolisher of rites and a god of heretical
doctrines, Kplikas and Klmukhas.1299 In short, iva is the god who violates the proper order
so as to restore it and therefore is the embodiment of the paradox at the very heart of the
sacrificial ritual itsef.1300
iva, as a Indian Dionysos embodies the paradoxo the violent sacred, that is to say the
reconcilatory victim. Girards theory of the scapegoat mechnaism offers a new insights into the
ivas violent transgression and his sexual transgression, as well as between the myths of
beheading and castration. iva, the erotic ascetic1301 seduced wives of the sages in order to
teach them a lesson, in other words, violating the law in order to restore the law. In turn, the
sages punished iva by using their yogic power to castrate him. Greek human scapegoat
pharmakos is also whipped on his sexual organs with herbaceous plants. They are victim
accused, like Oedipus, of patricide, incest, or of some other sexual transgression that signifies
the violent abolition of distinctions the major cause of cultural disintegration.1302
As the god of severed heads, castrated penises, ashes and sacrificial leftovers, iva is the

1295

Ibid., 67.
O'Flaherty, Siva: The Erotic Ascetic, 126 ff.
1297
OFlaherty, The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology, 279.
1298
Girard, "To Double Business Bound": Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology, 146.
1299
OFlaherty, The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology, 276 ff.
1300
See Hugh B. Urban, The Remnants of Desire: Sacrificial Violence and Sexual Transgression in the Cult of the
Kplikas and in the Writings of Georges Bataille. In: Religion(1995) 25, 70.
1301
O'Flaherty, Siva: The Erotic Ascetic.
1302
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 97-8.
1296

258

lord of the liminal excess which overflow the boundaries of the rational world.1303 The
world-renoucing iva as a reconcilatory victim is a slayer of distinctions who undifferentiates
the boundaries of the differentiated system of world order. The Kplikas appear to be one of
the few aivite sects who really try to imitate iva literally, rather than just symbolically, in all
of his most violent and sexual attributes. According to some texts, it is even said that iva
committed the crime of beheading Brahm precisely for the sake of founding the cult of the
Kplikas, and thereby providing a means to expiate the sin of killing a Brahman (once again
violating the law in order to restore it. iva invented Brahmanicide, also invented the vow to
expiate Brahmanicide.1304 The Kplikas are those who spend their lives in ascetic renuncation
doing penance for their sins specifically, the Mahvrata vow of carrying a skull-bowl as
penance for killing a Brahman.1305
Like iva himself, the Kplikas are lords of remainders and leftovers, of liminal and
ambigous things which do not fit properly into rational systems and which are therefore both
powerful and polluting. As their characteristic insignia they carry skulls and bone-ornaments,
smear their bodies with ashes, eat excrement and drink menstrual blood and sperm. They are
also infamous for their rejection of the caste system and for associating with the impure,
marginal figures of society, including sudras, untouchables, and menstruating prostitutes 1306
iva himself is the deity of both taboo and transgression and the erotic ascetic who both
punishes those who commit incest or violate the proper order of the sacrifice, and yet who also
commits the most violent and perverse crimes himself. Similarly, in many texts, the Kplikas
appear as the strictest and most severe of ascetics, known for their chastity and their great acts
of penance, such as the Mahvrata vow. But just as frequently, they appear as the most defiled
transgressors, who eat excrement, drink alcohol from skulls, have sex with outcastes and
perform human sacrifice.
As Lorenzen comments, the Kaplin (skull-bearer) who was punished to wander over the
earth with the skull fastened to his hand as his begging bowl, symbolizes the perfect yogin.
The Kaplin, like the omb, is a representation of the doctrine of the identity of opposites .1307
According to Girardian thinking, the Kaplin as the perfect world-renouncing yogin seems to be
a reconcilatory victim representing the festive and Dionysian coincidentia oppositorum, namely
violent undifferentiation. On the outward social level of daily life, the Kplikas usually
observed all the most stringent laws of the orthodox social order. It was generally only in the
carefully controlled environs of ritual that they violated the prohibitions against sexuality and
violence. The denial of caste occurs only in ritual situation. In day-to-day affairs, caste
1303

Urban, The Remnants of Desire: Sacrificial Violence and Sexual Transgression in the Cult of the Kplikas and
in the Writings of Georges Bataille, 73.
1304
OFlaherty, The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology, 281-3.
1305
David Lorenzen, The Kplikas and Klmukhas: Two Lost aivite Sects (Berkeley: University of California
Press 1972), 75.
1306
Urban, The Remnants of Desire: Sacrificial Violence and Sexual Transgression in the Cult of the Kplikas and
in the Writings of Georges Bataille, 73-4.
1307
Lorenzen, The Kplikas and Klmukhas: Two Lost aivite Sect, 70, 87f.

259

distinctions are still maintained. The transcending of caste barriers is valid only in the sacred
and secret circle of worship.1308 Taboos are violated only in a strict ritual context, in fact only
after they are first intensified and exaggerated.1309 Girards insights into the differentiating
mechanism of the reconcilatory victim provides a better interpretation of the dialetic of taboo
and transgression, of the erotic dialect of asceticism and hedonism. 1310

6.2. iva (the great yogin) as the Founding Victim

In a interview with me, Girard argues that iva (the great yogin, Mahyogin) is a
reconcilatory victim.1311 iva as the archetypal yogi, is the patron deity of those who abide in
the forest (vanaprasthas) and of wandering ascetics. 1312 iva, in the form of the terrible
Bhairava and in his transgressive essence, remained as the Sin-Eater(Ppabhakaa) par
excellence to devour the accumulated sins of devotees and pilgrims. The paradox of
Bhairavas scapegoat function even after his purification can be explained as a lawful
irregularity. In explaining the violent paradox of ivas transgressive sacrality, Girards
mimetic theory seems to be more persuasive than a post-structuralist hermeneutic of Hindu
mythico-ritual discourse based on the phenomenology of Transgressive Sacrality. Bhairava,
terrifying aspect of iva, is the god of transgression par excellence, for he appears only to cut
off the fifth head of Brahm, Brahmanicide being the most heinous crime in the Hindu tradition.
Yet Bhairavas example was ritually imitated by the gruesome Kplika ascetics, who still have
their successors in the modern Aghoris and Nths.1313 iva cuts off Brahmas fifth head with his
thumb nail. The head does not leave Bhairavas hand, so he wanders around various pilgrimage
sites (trha) until he reaches Varanasi where the skull falls at the Kaplamocana (freeing the
skull) trha; iva is then freed from the sin of Brahmanicide. As the wanderer with the
Brahmans(i.e. Brahms) skull, iva is also known as the beggar Bhik
yatana and the skull bearer Kplin.1314 Things hidden the transgressive-criminal skull-bearer as a representation of
the doctrine of the undifferentiating identity of opposites could be unveiled as scapegoat
systems of representation.1315
1308

Ibid., 7.
Urban, The Remnants of Desire: Sacrificial Violence and Sexual Transgression in the Cult of the Kplikas and
in the Writings of Georges Bataille, 79.
1310
Ibid., 78.
1311
Personal communication with Girard (COV&R Conference 2005 at Schoenstatt Center, Koblenz/GERMANY,
July 6-9).
1312
Long, iva and Dionysos Versions of Terror and Bliss, 195.
1313
Chalier-Visuvalingam, Bhairavas Royal Brahmanicide: The Problem of the Mahbrhma a, 157, 163.
1314
Flood, An Introduction to Hinduism, 157.
1315
Girard, Job: The Victim of His People, 111.
1309

260

iva directed Bhairava to roam the world in this beggarly condition to atone for the sin of
Brahmanicide, showing to the world the rite of expiation for removing the sin of Brahmanicide
and begging for alms by resorting to the penitential rite of the skull (kaplavrata). 1316
Bhairavas twelve-year wandering as a beggar, bearing Brahmas skull as public testimony to
his crime and begging from the seven houses of the seven sages in the Daru forest, all of these
and other traits, like his exclusion from settlements and inhabiting the cremation grounds,
correspond exactly to the prescribed punishment for Brahmanicide in the Brahmanical law
books. But whereas in Hindu society such Brahmanicides, even if themselves Brahmans, were
treated as horrible outcastes and considered wholly degraded, Bhairava is exalted in the myth as
the supreme divinity by Brahm and Vi nu, the latter even recognizing that he remains untainted
by the sin of Brahmanicide.1317
The Brahman student is under a duty of chastity: if he fails in this duty he is required to
make an offering of an ass to the goddess Nirti: his portion of the victim is cut from the penis:
and thereafter he goes about clad in the skin of the victim and begging for alms, duly
proclaiming his sin to those from whom he begs. The husband who sins against his wife wears
also an asss skin and begs, proclaiming that he has sinned against her. The murderer carries the
skull of the dead man, drinks out of it, wears an asss skin or the skin of a dog, which indicates
him as a murderer to all and sundry, and lives on alms, declaring to those from whom he begs
the crime which he has committed.1318
The punishment of Bhairava corresponds perfectly to the norms of Brahmanical
orthodoxy. His simultaneous exaltation and sacralization could be explained by the Girards
insights into the scapegoat mechanism. The doctrines and practices of the Kplika ascetics took
the Brahmanical Bhairava for their divine archetype. Even when themselves not originally
Brahmanicides, these Kplika performed the Mahvrata or Great Penance bearing the skullbowl and skull-staff (khavga) of a Brahman.1319 The miscreants sentence of social exile
was imposed for a period of twelve years. The Sanskrit name given to these ascetics, who soon
evolved into a sect of yogins, was Kaplika or skull-bearers dwelling as an outcaste in the
cremation grounds and consuming the food offerings presented to the dead. Besmeared with
human ashes, wearing bone ornaments, intoxicated with divine madness, eating from a human
skull-cup and brandishing a skull-topped club (khatavanga), and waring away human beings
with the rattle of his double-skull drum(damaru), the outcaste automatically assumed the
traditional guise of the yogin.1320

1316

Chalier-Visuvalingam, Bhairavas Royal Brahmanicide: The Problem of the Mahbrhma a, 160

-1.
Ibid., 164.
1318
Arthur Berriedale Keith, The Religion and Philosophy of the Veda and. Upanishads (Westport, CT: Greenwood
Press, 1971), 266.
1319
Chalier-Visuvalingam, Bhairavas Royal Brahmanicide: The Problem of the Mahbrhma a, 164.
1320
Robert Beer, The Encyclopedia of Tibetan Symbols and Motifs Text and Illustrations (London : Serindia
Publications, 1999),
1317

261

In Buddhism, we can find traces of the Kplikas These radical imitators of the archetypal
yogin, iva, with their low-caste female associates, witches rather than spiritual companions,
seem far indeed from the quite cloisters of the Buddhist monastic universities and the calm
rationality of Madhyamaka philosophy. And yet the Tibetan texts such as the translation of the
Caturasitisiddhapravrtti or the writings of Taranatha describe, according to Samuel, the
Buddhist siddhas as sharing most of the external features attributed to the Kplikas and their
fellows, including the bone ornaments and skull-cups, the low-caste female companions, and the
midnight rituals in cremation grounds.1321 In the Lalitavistara it is stated that the Buddha
himself practised sphnaka yoga. In the Majjhima Nikya it is stated that the Buddha himself
in his early days had stayed in a cemetery with bones as his pillow. The use of skulls as
almsbowls by the Buddhist monks, referred to in the Cullavagga, was evidently due to Tantric
influence.1322
The terrifying, cremation-ground character of the higher Buddhist tantras has its roots
in aiva mythology. According to the myth described variously in the Pur as, the original skull
observance (kplavratam), or great observance(mahvratam), was the result of a quarrel
between Brahm and the Vedic form of iva, Rudra. When Rudra ends the matter by plucking
off Brahms head, he finds he has commited the heinous crime of slaying a brahmin
brahmahaty). He is then forced to undergo a period of extreme penance in which he lives in
exile from society, dwells in cremation grounds (sites of the greatest impurity), smears himself
with ashes of the dead, and begs for food using a bowl made of a human skull. Orthodox
Dharmastra states that brahmin-slayers can only expiate their offence through a period of
twelve years in exile, by inhabiting cremation grounds and by carrying a skull bowl (kaplam)
and skull staff (khavga) when begging food.1323
As Girard has suggested, parricide or regicide strikes at the most fundamental, essential,
and inviolable distinction within the group. He becomes, literally, the slayer of
distinctions.1324 Brahmanicide of iva has to be understood as a sort of accusation against a
reconcilatory victim. In Girards reading of Sophocles version of the Oedipus myth, he sees the
accusation of patricide and incest as being a concealing device intended to mask the fact that
Oedipus is a victim of sacrificial violence, by making him instead a monstrous exception to the
social order that governs family relationships.
As in the Vidypha cults, there are Buddhist deities who are Kplika in an iconic form.
They wear the five bone-ornaments and are smeared with ashes (the six seals [mudrs] of the
Kplikas). They drink blood from skull-bowls (kapla), have the aiva third eye, stand on the
prostrate bodies of lesser deities, wear ivas sickle moon in their massed and matted hair (ja)
1321

Samuel, Civilized Shamans. Buddhism in Tibetan Societies, 421.

Bhattacharyya, Buddhism in the History of Indian Ideas, 65; Lee, Buddhist Ideas and Rituals in Early India and
Korea, 129.
1323
English, Vajrayogin : Her Visualizations, Rituals & Forms : A Study of the Cult of Vajrayogin in India, 40.
1324
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 74.
1322

262

And just as in the Vidypha, their cults are set in that of the Yogins. Those who are initiated
by introduction into the maalas of these Yogin-encircled Buddhist deities are adorned with
bone-ornaments and given the Kplikas khavnga and skull bowl to hold.1325 Recently the
beliefs and practices that are claimed to be a tradition of Buddhist Kplika has been discussed.
According to this study, some early schools of Buddhist tantricism seem to have been strongly
influenced by the Kplikas. On the other hand, Alexis Sanderson, who has been working with
unpublished manuscripts of the Buddhist yogintantra tradition, claims that this tradition should
be considered to be a variant of the aiva Kplika.1326
Padmasambhava was the most famous of these Buddhist mahasiddhas. Yet his early
activitiy in India clearly links him to the Kplika tradition. The only attribute borne by
Padmasambhava which distinguished him from a Kplika is his vajra, which symbolically
identifies him as a practitioner of Vajrayana Buddhism. Many of the Buddhist siddhas and
dakinis carry the Kplika attributes of the trident-topped khatvanga, skull-cup (kapala) and
damaru. Episodes in the life of Padmasambhava bear a striking similarity to many of the
legends of the eighty-four Buddhist mahasiddas. In his biography Padmasambhava karmically
causes the death of a ministers wife and two infants and is sent to exile, where he takes up
residence in the Cool Sandalwood Grove charnel ground near Bodh Gaya. For five years he
lives the life of a Kplika, using corpses for his meditation seat, consuming human flesh,
giving and receiving teachings from the dakinis, and subduing countless ethereal beings.1327
The Buddhist initiate into the esoteric cults of the yogintantras likewise performed a
skull observance, knonwn as the vow of the observance of heroes (vracaryvrata), or the
vajra (i.e., Vajraynist) skull observance (vajrakplikacaryvratam). As in the aiva
tradition, this was based on the practitioners inner identification with his chosen deity and
involved worship of the god with impure substances. In Abhaykaraguptas description of the
vajra skull observance, the male practitioner wears the attributes of the Buddhist deity
Cakrasavara. Another feature of the Vajrayogin cult that owes its origin to non-dualistic aiva
developments is its emphasis on the worship of female deities. In the vidyp
ha traditions of
aivism, the cremation-ground cults center on families of mothers: classes of wild yogins
who drink bood, wear skull ornaments, and are enticed by impure offerings of bodily and sexual
excretions.1328
Unanimous violence is generative of a religious order and the man charged with the crime
of patricide and incest is credited with the act of generation.1329 The Kplikas association with
cremation grounds and other inauspicious places is keeping with the ritual practices of more
1325

White, Introduction. Tantra In Practice: Mapping a Tradition, 23.

David N. Lorenzen, New Data on the Kplikas, in Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Gods
of Popular Hinduism, ed. Alf Hiltebeitel (New Delhi: Manohar, 1989), 232-3.
1327
Beer, The Encyclopedia of Tibetan Symbols and Motifs Text and Illustrations, 250.
1328
English, Vajrayogin : Her Visualizations, Rituals & Forms : A Study of the Cult of Vajrayogin in India, 40.
1329
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 250.
1326

263

extreme Tantric ascetics. The basic aim of wandering about in such places was to overcome the
duality of pure and impure, and the fear of death, by constant contact with impure places and
things such as cremation grounds and corpses. This constant association with impurity would
also force the adepts to learn to endure the scorn and disgust of persons who were still tied to
the rules of proper social behaviour. Other social rules that the Kplikas and other Tantric
adepts purposely transgressed concern sex and food. In literary works such as the Mattvilsa,
the Kplikas are often described as hednonists addicted to sexual play with beautiful female
companions and to drinking liquor and eating meat. Some Tantric adepts did engage in
extramarital sexual intercourse and the consumption of foods prohibited to upper-caste Hindus,
such as meat and liquor. In the best-known ritual, the adept took the five prohibited things
whose names begin with the letter M: liquor, meat, fish, parched grain, and sexual intercourse
(madya, msa, matsya, mudr, maithuna). The female partner in the act of sexual intercourse
is usually described as a low-caste woman who is not the male adepts own wife. The basic aim
of all this, as in the case of the association with cremation grounds and corpses, was considered
to rise above the duality of the pure and the impure through the transgression of the rules of
proper social conduct. The ritual is regarded as a reenactment of the sexual intercourse
between iva and his wife, the goddess called Prvat or Um. The untouchables help officiate
during the highly polluting rite of cremation.1330
Oedipus was also receptacle for universal shame. Oedipus was associated with the evil
aspects of the crisis. Having plunged the community into strife, the surrogate victim restores
peace and order by his depature.1331 The radical world-renouncers constant association with
impurity can be found also in Buddhist world-renouncer, the bhikkhus willful contamination
with death by taking up residence in cremation grounds, using discarded cloth from rubbish
heaps, and engaging in contemplation of death. Buddhist world- renouncers are positively
contaminating themselves with the contemplation of decay and the stench of death, and
apropriating the rags of the charnel house for their patched-up robes. 1332 In Buddhism,
contemplation of and contact with death was a major preoccupation of the monk. The
accent is on visiting graveyards, confrontation with death and corpses, meditation on death to
understand the transitoriness of life. The wearing of the pamsakulina rags gathered from
graveyards is an extreme gesture of this absorption with death.1333

6.3. World-Renouncers Yogic Meditation on Death

1330

David N. Lorenzen, A Parody of the Kplikas in the Mattavilsa, in David Gordon White, (ed), Tantra in
Practice. Princeton Reading in Religions (Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000), 82-3.
1331
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 85.
1332
Tambiah, Purity and Auspiciousness at the Edge of the Hindu Context in Theravda Buddhist Societies, 96-7.
1333
Tambiah, Buddhism and Spirit Cults in North-East Thailand (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970),
65 ; Holt, ''Assisting the Dead by Venerating the Living: Merit Transfer in the Early Buddhist Tradition,'' 19, n.71.

264

Various (world-renouncers) death meditations or meditation on death are found

throughout the Buddhist world, aimed at undercutting worldly attachments. Such meditations
range from simple reflection on the inevitability of death, to the elaborate Tibetan tantric death
simulations, in which the adept rehearses in meditation the physiological processes of
dissolution. Best known in the southern Buddhist tradition, the contemplation of actual corpses
in charnel grounds, though technically belonging to the category of meditations for engendering
aversion to the body (asubba-bhvan), in effect becomes a powerful form of death
meditation. 1334
The radical world-renouncer was forced to learn to endure the scorn and disgust of persons.
This can be understood against the background of the scorn, hostility, and cruelty displayed
against the reconcilatory victim. The victim is defined as a scapegoat who becomes the
receptacle of human passions. Not only the mythological and radical world-renouncers (iva,
Kplikas, Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, siddhas), but also the king in the sacred monarchies of
continental Africa is required to commit an act of incest, either real or symbolic, on certain
solemn occasions notably, at this enthronement or in the course of the periodic rites of renewal.
Among the kings possible partners are virtually all the women formally forbidden him by
matrimonial regulations: mother, sisters, daughters, nieces, cousins, etc. In societies where the
incestuous act is no longer actually consummated if, indeed, it ever was a symbolism of
incest persists. The rite forms part of an overall ritualistic procedure that prescribes the other
transgressions the king must commit before he takes office. For example, he must eat certain
forbidden foods, and commit certain acts of violence. On occasion the king is required to
commit all the forbidden acts that are imaginable and possible for him to commit. The king is
supposed to incarnate: the paragon of transgressors. The incest, as well as the other forbidden
acts, are designed to make the king the very incarnation of impurity. It is because of this
impurity that the king, in the course of the enthronement and renewal ceremonies, is subjected
to the ritualistic insults and abuse of his people. A hostile crowd denounces the misconduct of
this miscreant, who is as yet nothing more than a criminal and a social outcast.1335
The skull bowl in tantric Buddhism itself is formed of a severed head, part of the standard
insignia of kplika praxis, while the blood within it is often said to be that of the four wicked
mras, or of other evils. Vajravrhi is also beautified by a set of five tantric ornaments, all
made of human bone, and known collectively as the five mudrs, or signs indicating here the
signs of kplika observance. These include a chaplet, earrings, a necklace, armlets, and a girdle.
A sixth sign is worn by male gods, consisting of ashes from the cremation ground smeared over
the body. It is these six that became the prototype for tantric yogins, who wore them as part of
their skull observance (kaplikavratam). 1336 The instigators of the tantras were the
1334

Jacqueline I. Stone, Death, in Donald S. Lopez, Critical Terms for the Study of Buddhism (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2005), 59.
1335
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 104-5.
1336
English, Vajrayogin : Her Visualizations, Rituals & Forms : A Study of the Cult of Vajrayogin in India, 157-8.

265

mahasiddhas of India, many of whom practised their sadhanas for twelve symbolic years in the
eight great cremation grounds, where they often received transmission directly from the dakinis.
Iconographically they are often represented with the Kapalika adornments of an animal skin,
matted hair, and bone arnaments; they are smeared with ashes, and bear the two main Kapalika
attributes of a skull-cup and khatvanga.1337
Girards mimetic theory privides a better hermeneutical key for the understanding of this
criminal gods, transgressive iva, Kplikas and other radical and original world-renouncing
imitators of this Indian Dionysos in Buddhism than a post-structuralist hermeneutic of Hindu
mythico-ritual discourse based on the phenomenology of transgressive sacrality does.
Bhairava, terrifying aspect of iva, is the god of transgression par excellence, for he appears
only to cut off the fifth head of Brahm, Brahmanicide being the most heinous crime in the
Hindu tradition. Bhairavas beheading of Brahms fifth head is indeed symbolic of all manner
of transgression of the norms of classical Brahmanism. The criminal Kplika, he had already
transcended both good and evil and always remained untainted by them.

1338

The criminal and transgressive king of sacred monarchy also is required to violate the most
sacred laws, in particular the laws of exogamy. All this takes place because punishment of the
severest sort seems to be in order, and the needful insults and hostilities find their outlet in
sacrificial ceremonies in which the king plays the chief role of the reconcilatory victim. The real
or symbolic sacrifice of the monarch takes place. And the sacrifice of the king is clearly a
punishment of his transgressions. In Ruanda, for exmple, the king and the queen mother
clearly an incestuous couple must periodically submit to a sacrificial rite that can only be
regarded as a symbolic punishment for incest. For Girard, each African king is a new Oedipus,
obliged to play out his own myth from beginning to end, because ritualistic theory sees in this
enactment the means of renewing and perpetuating a cultural order that is constantly on the
brink of destruction. The king reigns only by virtue of his future death; he is no more and no
less than a victim awaiting sacrifice, a condemned man about to be executed. The king must
show himself worthy of his punishment. It is important to cultivate the future victims
supposed potential for evil, to transform him into a monster of iniquity in order to enable him
to polarize, to literally draw to himself, all the infectious strains in the community and transform
them into sources of peace and fecundity.1339

6.4. World-Renouncer as Sin-Eater

iva plays the role of the sin-eater(ppabhakaa) par excellence to devour the
1337
1338
1339

Beer, The Encyclopedia of Tibetan Symbols and Motifs Text and Illustrations, 250.
Chalier-Visuvalingam, Bhairavas Royal Brahmanicide: The Problem of the Mahbrhma a, 169.
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 104-8.

266

accumulated sins of devotees and pilgrims.1340 ivas had swallowed the poison lokarakrtham, that the world might be safe.1341 ivas drinking of poison may be traced back to the
Vedic sage who drinks poison with Rudra, an ecstatic practice which remained a part of Hindu
yoga: the yogi is said to have the power to digest deadly poison as if it were nectar. Similarly it
is said, By the poison which kills all animals, by that same poison the physician destroys
disease. Here iva (the propounder of the Tantric system) prescribes poison which eradicates
poison.1342 Nlakaha, a form of Bodhisattva Avalokitevara is evidently modelled on iva
who is said to have saved the world from destruction by swallowing the poison that issued from
the mounth of Vsuki, the lord of serpents, while the gods and the demons were churning the
ocean together. He kept the poison in his throat and that is why the name Nlakaha(one who
has a blue throat) was attributed to him. The Buddhist iconological texts describe him purely in
terms of the description of iva as wearing a tigers skin, having a blue throat caused by poison
and flanked by cobras.1343 Like Siva, who ingested the poison that emerged from the Churning
of the Oceans and thereby allowed creation to proceed, the Aghori (a radical world-renouncer)
is a swallower of poison. Like his prototype he is addicted to narcotics, is master of evil
spirits.1344
World-renouncer Buddhas eating of poisoned last meal, as we have seen, could be also
explained aginst the background of understanding the world-renouncer as a sin-eater and
poison-eater. The archetypal yogi, iva, as a wanderng beggar is a poison-eater.

1345

It is

fairly widespread in Hinduism for an ascetic, a priest, or a deity to be thought of as accepting

and consuming the impurities and sins of followers, clients, and devotees. There is a ubiquitous
belief that a guru can actually assume the load of karmic effects carried by devotees. Babuji
Maharaj, for example, suffered from a mild case of leukoderma, which he is said to have taken
onto himself from a female devotee. In accord with this general idea, an offering to a guru
would appear to be a possible vehicle through which the offerer can deliver up impurities, his or
her sins, which are taken by the guru into or onto himself.1346
Sdhus, sacred men of India may take over a part of somebody elses karma, but then they
must suffer the consequences and has to work it out themselves.1347 The renouncers, where
Hindu, Buddhist or Jain, often seem to be under some sort of obligation to accept the gifts
presented to them. But in spite of the obligation to receive gifts, a recurring theme in the
behaviour and the ideology of the recipient is an initial unwillingness to accept. Here we
touch on the fundamental ambiguity of the institutionalized giving. For the Brahmins the gift is
1340
1341
1342
1343
1344
1345
1346
1347

Chalier-Visuvalingam, Bhairavas Royal Brahmanicide: The Problem of the Mahbrhma a, 163.

J. Gonda, Viuism and ivaism. A Comparison (London: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1970), 123.
OFlaherty, iva. The Erotic Ascetic, 279.
Bhattacharyya, Buddhism in the History of Indian Ideas, 116.
Parry, Sacrificial Death and the Necrophagous Ascetic, 99.
OFlaherty, iva. The Erotic Ascetic, 8.
Laidlaw, Riches and Renunciation: Religion, Economy, and Society among the Jains, 307, n.8.
Hartsuiker, Sdhus. Holy Men of India, 75.

267

dangerous to accept. The same danger is found in Buddhism and Jainism.1348

As the god of violent and sexual excess, iva is also called the lord of the remainder
Vstopati, the god of the leftover which do not fit neatly into closed system of the ritual or the
social order.1349 Like leavings generally in Hinduism, the remnant of the sacrifice is impure and
polluting.In India generally, leftovers are always highly ambivalent: the remanants of food and
of the human body (sexual fluids, excrement, hair and nail clippings) symbolize that which
violate the tidy boundaries of the rational system. In Mary Douglas terms, they are the
refuseor dirt, the polluting substances which do not fit into categories of the social order, and
which are therefore both dangerous and powerful.1350 When the world-renouncers seek alms,
they come from their forest and haunts to where the laity live, receiving left-over scraps as
food ( Theragth 1057).1351
iva as Bhikshatana (the beggar) had to atone for his crime of cutting off Brahmas head, by
begging for his food from door to door.1352 iva enters the forest in the form of a Kplika,
following the vow of expiation that he must undergo because of the beheading of Brahm. He
begs from the wives of the seven sages just as one who has killed a Brahmin must beg from
seven houses. The motifs of beheading and castration share the important element of physical
mutilation inflicted because of a sexual crime. iva is burdened with the skull and forced to
wander about, haunted by Brahminicide. 1353 Any brahmacrin who has shed his seed in
violation of his vow of chastity must put on the skin of an ass and go to seven houses, begging
and proclaiming his misdeed, and a Brahmin who invites to his bed a woman other than his wife
must wander over the earth as a beggar.1354
Having renounced the world and entered the forest, a world-renouncer Buddha (like the
archetypal world-renouncing yogi iva) followed the way of the forest renunciation. From
this time forth, he is himself a ramaa, wearing the garb of a mendicant, begging his food from
the laity, and dwelling in the uninhabited forest (nirjanavana) in no fixed abode.1355The bhikkhu
wanders from house to house collecting food; he is

a gapless wanderer (sapadna-crin) in

the sense that he walks from house to house, to all houses, indifferently and without
distinction.1356 The ideal method of begging is called mdhkara, which means to beg like a
1348

Brekke, Contradiction and the Merit of Giving in Indian Religions, 298-9.

Sunthar Visuvalingam, The Transgressive Sacrality of the Dk
ita: Sacrifice, Criminality and Bhakti in the
Hindu Tradition, in Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Guardians of Popular Hinduism. Alf
Hiltebeteil (ed.) (Albany, SUNY 1989), 429f. Like leavings generally in Hinduism, the remnant of the sacrifice is
impure and polluting.
1350
Urban, The Remnants of Desire: Sacrificial Violence and Sexual Transgression in the Cult of the Kplikas and
in the Writings of Georges Bataille, 73.
1351
Ray, Buddhist Saints in India. A Study in Buddhist Values & Orientations, 83.
1352
OFlahrty, The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology, 315
1353
OFlaherty, iva. The Erotic Ascetic, 123-4.
1354
OFlaherty, iva. The Erotic Ascetic, 57.
1355
Ray, Buddhist Saints in India. A Study in Buddhist Values & Orientations, 49.
1356
Tambiah, The Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets, 33.
1349

268

bee. Mdhkara is defined as the food that is begged from five or seven houses at random; that
is, the world-renouncer does not select the houses he will visit.1357
Many ascetic traditions use the image of the ascetic imitation of animals to express their
opposition to society and culture, their rejection of the cultural norms of rational and proper
behaviour. An ancient law book introduces life-styles dedicated to sacredness with a verse that
admonishes people seeking sacredness to behave like beasts. The imitation of animals is most
often associated with the way ascetics obtain and eat their food. The typical way of begging
food (mdhkara) is named after the bee and imitates the way bees gather nectar. Two special
ways of obtaining food that are associated with higher classes of world-renouncers, as we have
also seen, are named after the cow and the python. Other sources tell us of world-renouncer
who imitated cows and dogs. The Mahbhrata (5.97.14) offers the following definition of an
ascetic who practices the cow-vow (govrata): He is said to observe the cow-vow who lies
down anything anywhere[that is, wherever he may happen to be in the evening], feeds on
anything, and covers himself with anything whatsoever. A Buddhist source speak of worldrenouncer who imitate dogs by going naked, walking on all fours, lying on the ground, and
picking up food thrown on the ground with the mouth.1358

6.5. World-Renouncer Undifferentiates World Order

Thus, there were some affinity between (forest) world-renouncers and wild animals. Some
(radical) world-renouncers endeavour to never use any eating vessel other than the hollow of
their hands, while others eat in animal fashion, by grazing directly with their mouths. Such is
the practice of the world-renouncer called turytta, who thus eat in cow-like fashion. The
wild sdhus one sees thronging to the great pilgrimage centres may at times push the
imitation of animals in other directions, with some endeavouring to only move by leaps and
bounds, in monkey fashion. Orthodox Hindus react to such displays of prowess with a mixture
of disdain and fear. They consider these sdhus to be a perverted and degraded form of
sanysin. But, according to Malamoud, we should nevertheless recall, in spite of the apparent
gult between the sanysin and the sdhu, that it is the same (world-renouncing) ascetic
impulse and the same decision to disengage oneself from village structures, that guides them
both.1359
The alms-round is called gocari, which means grazing, literally eating like a cow. As the
cow eats wahtever is available, so the world-renouncer mixes different kinds of food from
different households, regardless of the taste.1360 Buddhist monks, as we have seen, erases the
laymens cognitive and affective maps by crossing the latters boundaries of social and physical
1357
1358
1359
1360

Olivelle, Sanysa Upaniads: Hindu Scriptures on Asceticism and Renunciation, 104.

Ibid., 110.
Malamoud, Cooking the World: Ritual and Thought in Ancient India, 83, n. 50.
Laidlaw, Riches and Renunciation. Religion, Economy, and Society among the Jains, 305.

269

spaces, culinary distinctions, and pure-impure categorizations. By mixing different kinds of

food in the same bowl and eating all at once, world-renouncer becomes s dissolver of manmade cultural categories,1361a slayer of distinctions in Girardian sense. World-renouncers
begging is not just a means of subsistence but an outward token that he has renounced the world.
The world-renouncer had gone beyond the reach of impurity because he had rejected purity.
His food obtained by begging was neither pure nor impure. He could beg from all and sundry
without regard to the donorss hierarchical status of purity. 1362
From the standpoint of the human relationship between beggar and donor, it can be said that
the way of the Buddhist monk is very strict in the sense that it does not permit any interrelation.
The Buddist monks, by begging at random for food from household to household and at the
same time by keeping silence, were not concerned with others, that is to say, with their donors.
Begging should be routinely performed in a mechanical manner.1363 Dna (ritual feeding of
the world-renouncer) is held by the normative dharma texts to have replaced yaja, sacrifice.
The single rauta sacrificer, continuing the tradition of the mobile fireplace, turned into the
itinerant world-renouncer as did the fire-worshiping Kassapa and his cenobitic followers when
they gave up the external cult fire that was vanquished by the Buddhas inner fire.1364
We have previously noted that the begging bowl represents the life of Buddhist worldrenouncer. A Buddhist monk who had forgotten his bowl in the refectory was reprimanded, for
his begging bowl represented his life. A little later, when the monks bowl was broken by
accident by one of his fellow monks, he died of grief. Then an enormous snake entered the
monastery and spread terror throughout the community until another Buddhist monk pacified it
by preaching to it the dogma of karmic retribution. After the disappearance of the snake, it was
explained that this was a reincarnation of the monk, come back to take his revenge on the monk
who broke his bowl.1365 The custom of placing amulets in the begging bowl which is used
during the ordination ceremony and often seen in central Thailand also seems to stand for the
importance and sacrality of the world-renouncers begging bowl.1366
We have already seen that Buddhism adapted the Brahmanical rddha ceremony, in which
gifts were seen as transferred to deceased relatives by giving them to Brahmins at memorial
rites at various intervals after a death in the family. Theravda rites for the dead therefore
include the feeding of monks and the transference of the auspicious quality of the deed
(merit) to the deceased, or whatever other ancestors may be petas, in the hope that this will
ease their lot as petas or help them to a better rebirth. Theravdin donations to Buddhist monks
often conclude with a verse transferring the auspicious quality of the gift to gods. These are
1361

Tambiah, The Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets, 35-7 ; Tambiah, Purity and Auspiciousness
at the Edge of the Hindu Context in Theravda Buddhist Societies, 99.
1362
Olivelle, The Origin and the Early Development of Buddhist Monarchism, 16-7.
1363
Ryokai Shiraishi, Asceticism in Buddhism and Brahmanism : A Comparative Study, 162.
1364
Heesterman, Broken World of Sacrifice: An Essay in Ancient Indian Ritual, 141.
1365
Bernard Faure, The Will to Orthodoxy. A Critical Geneology of Northern Chan Buddhism (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 1997), 95.
1366
Terwiel, Monks and Magic: An Analysis of Religious Ceremonies in Central Thailand, 67.

270

seen as having less opportunity to do auspicous deeds themselves, but can benefit from
transferred merit, which helps maintain them in their divine rebirth.1367
Correlative to this shift in emphasis from pits to the Buddhist sagha is a shift in the means
by which the transformation of the departed to pit or devat is effected in the two respective
traditions. In Hinduism, it is the efficacy of the sacrificial act itself (even if brahmins are fed)
that is emphasized in rddha. In Buddhism, it is the body of the sagha that serves as a
template for the petas transformation. The world-renouncing sagha is described as a field of
merit. White recongnized that the concept of merit transfer, although quite rare in the Pli
canon, is almost totally bound up in the discussion of petas. The key terms of Pli canon
references to merit transfer found in the Petavatthu are pattidna, dakkhia (offering of alms to
a member of the sagha on behalf of petas) and dnam (gift). Accroding to White, the
mechanics of merit transfer begins with a peta makes a request to a descendent, relation, a
friend that an offering (dakkha) be made to a member of the sagha on his behalf.

1368

The mechanistic workings of the sacrificial act in the Hindu context are ethicized in
Buddhism so that the moral acts and the donors intention in dakkhia become all important.
The circularity of the sacrificial offering is nonetheless maintained throughout in this
ethicized Buddhist context, as the offering of food (with proper intent) is transformed into a
reciprocal gift of teaching of the dhamma, from which the donor arrives at a new insight that is
a sort of moral rebirth (while the peta is reborn through the transformed food offering into a
higher karmalogical station.1369
Buddhist replacement of the sacrificial with an agricultural metaphor (Buddhist worldrenouncer as merit field) can be well explained by Girards mimetic theory. The transformation
take place on the worldly plane through proper planting, cultivation, and fruition, etc., in
and through the sagha as merit field. 1370
As we have also seen, bhikkhus not only replace the Brhma
ic al family as the primary
socio-religious unit, but they also replace the deceased as cultic objects of veneration. Like
the Brhmaical priest of the rddha rites performed on the eleventh day of ritual observance,
Buddhist world-renouncer continue the tradition of symbolizing the presence of the dead.1371
World-renunciation theoretically renders the initiate as dead to the world, separated from the
world of the laity. If we can speak of a relationship between the living and the dead in early
Buddhism, it is the reciprocal relationship existing between the laity and bhikkhus.1372 White
sees the same sacrificial mechanism or model operating in both cases, but with the center of

1367

Harvey, An Introduction to Buddhism. Teachings, History and Practices, 43.

David Gordon White, Dakkhia and Agnicayana: An Extended Application of Paul Muss Typology, in
History of Religions 26 (1986), 205-7.
1369
Ibid., 210-1.
1370
White, Dakkhia and Agnicayana: An Extended Application of Paul Muss Typology, 211, n. 88.
1371
Holt, ''Assisting the Dead by Venerating the Living: Merit Transfer in the Early Buddhist Tradition,'' 19.
1372
Ibid., 19-20.
1368

271

gravity shifted from the metacosm to the mesocosm in the Buddhist case. A basis for this
understanding of the (bhikkhu)saghas role, especially vis--vis petas and dakkhia, may be
described in terms of the replacement of the sagha for Hindu pits as an object of veneration in
Hinayana Buddhism. The bhikkhu, by going forth (pabbaj), becomes dead to the world and
thus apart from the world of the laity. As such, he symbolizes the presence of the dead in the
world, becoming an object of veneration for the living.1373

6.6. Sacrificial Mechanism of Merit Transfer

This mechanics of merit transfer or sacrificial mechanism or model operating in
reciprocal relationship existing between the worldly laity and world-renouncing bhikkhus can
be well explained in terms of the double transference of the scapegoat mechanism. Girard
calls the transferring of blame onto the victim and then the transferring of credit for the new
peace and prosperity double transference. Girard speaks of the metaphysical and religious
illusion of the victim and the founding mechanism. The victim is passive, but because the
collective transference discharges the community of all responsibility, it creates the illusion of a
supremely active and all-powerful victim.1374
Religious phenomena are essentially characterized by the double transference, the
aggressive transference followed by the reconciliatory transference. The reconciliatory
transference sacralizes the victim.1375 Buddhis transferring of bad karma and sin onto the worldrenouncer and then transferring of merit for the worldly householder cound be read in this light
of double transference of surrogate victim mechanism. Buddhist mechanism of double
transference between world-renouncer and worldly householder could be explained by the
Girards insight into the double transferential interpretation made by religious thought.
In Hinayna Buddhism, the notion of the transfer of merit is explained through the image of
the assembled Buddhist saints, who constitute an excellent field (khettpam) in which
meritorious acts may be sown and thereafter bear fruit for the benefit of others.1376 The idea of
the Buddhist monks and the Sagha as a field of merit (puakkhetta) is found in a number of
Pli texts, both canonical and post-canonical. In the first story of the Petavatthu the field of
merit, embodied in one monk, provides the opportunity to achieve a good rebirth in a seemingly
mechanistic and straightforward manner.1377 The idea of merit-making is the metaphysical

1373
1374
1375
1376
1377

White, Dakkhia and Agnicayana: An Extended Application of Paul Muss Typology, 204-5.
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 52.
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 37.
White, The Alchemical Body. Siddha Traditions in Medieval India, 270.
Brekke, Contradiction and the Merit of Giving in Indian Religions, 299-300.

272

foundation of such ritual feeding of world-renouncer.1378

The transference of merit in Theravda Buddhism was a borrowing from Mahyna
doctrine where Bodhisattvas can save others by their enormous store of merit.1379 Bodhisattva
is full of joy and faith, and concentrates on developing the perfection of generosity (dna) to a
high degree. This is done by giving away wealth, teachings, life, limb, and even spouse and
family, for the benefit of others. The merit from such acts is dedicated to the future
Buddhahood of himself and others. ntideva praises the transfer (pariman) of merit in the
final chapter of his Bodhi-caryvatra. He prays that, by the merit generated by his writing
this poem, humans and other beings should be free from various afflictions. In one verse, he
even prays that the sufferings of the world should ripen in him: that he should take on the bad
karma of others, not just give them his merit.1380
The violent paradox surrounding the world-renouncer as the reconcilatory victim and the
centre and origin of the world order can be explained by the mimetic concept of double
transference onto the victim. In symbolizing the victim, the society makes the reconcilatory
victims chosen from outside the community exterior to the community while nonetheless
placing the victim at the centre and origin of the community. Double transference guides such
interpretation. It transforms the victim into something radically other than, and transcendent to,
the community. The community belongs to the victim but the victim does not belong to the
community. In general, then, the victim will appear to be more foreign than native; as in many
myths, the victim is a visitor that has come from an unknown world. Even when the victim does
not appear in the guise of a stranger, it will be seen as coming or returning from the outside,
especially as returning to the outside at the moment when the community expels it.
The fact that sacrificial victims, even when they are human, are chosen from outside the
community suggest that the interpretation that makes the victim exterior to the community.1381
Frazer also speaks of the transference of sins to a sin-eater in India. In the Jataka, or collection
of Indian stories which narrate the many transmigrations of the Buddha, there is an instructive
tale, which sets forth how sins and misfortunes can be transferred by means of spittle to a sacred
ascetic.1382
With regard to the dress of the world-renouncer too there was an ideal rule which was,
however, flexible in practice. Pli texts call it pamsukula: rags collected from dust heaps. The
new robe was not to be made of a single sheet but of at least five pieces sewn together. Without
exception the world-renouncers dress had to be of a dirty (kasaya) colour, normally yellow or

1378

Ibid., 293.
Ibid., 297.
1380
Harvey, An Introduction to Buddhism. Teachings, History and Practices,123.
1381
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 78.
1382
James George Frazer, The Golden Bough. A Study in Magic and Religion. Third Edtion. Part I. The Scapegoat,
41-4.
1379

273

brownish orange.1383 The Visuddhimagga devotes it second chapter to what are called dhtaga,
which can be translated as ascetic practices. They become the hallmark in Thailland of
wandering monks who dwell in forest, caves, and wild places and are dedicated to the practice
of meditation in seculsion. The manual enumerates thirteen kinds of ascetic practices. The
bhikkhu collects refuse cloth for robes. Psukla means refuse in the sense of its being
found in such a place as a street, charnel ground, or midden, or in the sense of its being in a vile
state (The refuse-rag-wearers practice ).1384
The world-renouncers cloth was phaapaa, literally forest cloth(probably phaapaachaa,
cloth discarded in the charnel grounds), is from the Pali pamsukula-civara (phaa bangsukun).
This is plain white cloth left for the Buddhist monks to take as discarded in the traditional
manner. The ceremony of phaapaa (thort phaapaa) may be held at any time of the year outside
of phansaa (an addition to the principal ritual for offering robes thort kathin) and an
opportunity for spontaneous presentation of cloth and other items to forest monks (with
minimum ritual). In this traditional mode, discarded cloth(to make rag-robes though in
practices one will offer the best possible material) is left for wandering monks to pick up forest
paths (in this case no formal offering[prakhen] is necessary).1385The ritual of offering robes at
the end of the rains retreat provides the main opportunity for merit-making. The term bangsukun
(Pali: pamsukula) implies robes made from discarded rags. This kathin ritual is perhaps the most
important in the Buddhist calendar. 1386 It is ordered that world-renouncer should wear an
abandoned cloth by others.1387 Buddhist world-renouncers took their clothing from dead bodies,
clothes thrown away, or they collected rags and the like.1388
The clothes worn by monks and nuns are one of the most important symbols of the religious
life. A frequent passage in the Nikya texts tells us what was worn by those who had renounced
life in the world: I wish to have my hair and beard cut, wear ksya robes and leave my family,
going from home to homelessness. The phrase ksyavatthni refers to the usual dress of
renouncers at the time of the Buddha. The Pali adjective ksya denotes the color yellow or
ochre, and the term vatthni denotes materials, clothes or robes. According to the Vinaya, two
kinds of rag were used to make up the garments of Buddhist monks. Some were pieces of cloth
collected in burial-grounds, others were scraps of material gathered in streets and near shops.
Perhaps people threw them away in cremation-grounds specifically for ascetics to gather. The
Vinaya describes how traveling monks, in the first years of the Community, would collect rags
in cremation-grounds which they chanced to find on their way. It is possible that people

1383

Olivelle, The Origin and the Early Development of Buddhist Monarchism, 17-8.
Tambiah, The Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets, 33.
1385
Taylor, Forest Monks and the Nation-State: An Anthropological and Historical Study in Northeastern Thailland,
308, n. 15.
1386
Ibid., 293-5.
1387
pastamba Dharmastra II.9.21.11
1388
Shiraishi, Asceticism in Buddhism and Brahmanism : A Comparative Study, 211.
1384

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deliberately threw pieces of material there for that purposes. Buddhist monks were not
allowed to wear a robe made from a single, uncut piece of material. So a piece of cloth given by
lay followers could not be used immediately; it had to be cut into several pieces following the
dimensions specified in the Vinaya, and these hand then to be sewn together.1389

6.7. Meditation and Anticipation of Death

In his article Buddhisms Meditations on Death and the Symbolism of Initiatory Death,
Bond points out the fact that Theravada Buddhism has placed emphasis on techniques of
meditating on death. Although these meditations, involving concentration on the idea of
death as well as actual observation of decomposing corpses, may initially strike Westerners as
bizarre or morbid. For Bond, the notion of meditating on death and anticipating death raises
an important question for observers of Buddhism. By comparing the meditations on death with
Eliades analysis of the symbolism of initiatory death in archaic and primitive religions, Bond
argues that Theravada is neither unique nor pessimistic in its belief in the salvific nature of
confrontation with death.1390 As we have already seen, this Buddhist meditations on death could
be explicated in terms of world-renouncers salvific or soteriological meditations on death.
Theravada Buddhism has traditionally taught and practiced two forms of meditation that we
may regard meditations on death: maraasati, mindfulness of death, and asubha bhvan,
meditation on the foulness of the body as observed in decaying corpses. Both of these
meditations appear to represent ancient practices in Buddhism. ndoubtedly, a (worldrenouncing) meditator who diligently practiced mindfulness of death would experience a
vivid confrontation or anticipation of death. Meditating on death in terms of these reflections,
the (world-renouncing) meditator begins to comprehend the three marks of existence:
impermanence (anicca), suffering (dukkha), and no-self (anatta). Asubha bhvan, meditation
on the foulness of the dead bodies, requires a person to concentrate intently on and to develop
acute awareness of the reality of death manifested in a decaying, decomposing corpse
abandoned in a cremation ground. Concentrating on a corpse in all its repulsiveness and
loathesomeness, the world-renouncer compares his own body with it by reflecting, As this
[my body] is, so that is; as that is, so this is. These meditations on death gives the meditating
world-renouncer an increased sense of nonattachment toward the world.

1391

These

meditations on death might be regarded as examples of a pessimism or nihilism which some

1389

Mohan Wijayaratna, Buddhist Monastic Life. According to the Texts of the Theravda Tradition, translated by
Claude Grangier and Steven Collins. With an Introduction by Steven Collins (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press 1990), 32-8.
1390
George D. Bond, Theravada Buddhisms Meditations on Death and the Symbolism of Initiatory Death, in
History of Religions 19/ 3 (1980), 237-8.
1391
Ibid., 242-8.

275

critics have found characteristic of Buddhism. But we should consider these meditations on
death in the (social-anthropological ) context of the world-renunciation and of worldrenouncers dharma.
Buddhist meditations on death should be viewed as Buddhist world-renouncers meditation
on death, emptiness and voidness. The symbolism of death, dying to the world and withdrawing
from society is central to the Buddhist meditations on death. To be ordained a Buddhist
bhikkhu or monk, a person must go forth from home to homelessness, which means
renouncing the world and things of the world. And although bhikkhus may live in a vihra in
close proximity to a village and assit the laypeople through teaching and services, they are to be
in the world but not of it. Many of the outward aspects of monastic life, according to Bond,
signify death, the bhikkhus death to profane existence. In the early days of the worldrenouncing Sangha, the robes worn by bhikkhus were to be made from pieces of cloth found in
the cremation ground or else where. The yellow color (ksya) of the robe signifies death; it
was the color of the robe worn by the royal executioner in ancient India.1392
Possibly because of these ancient associations, Buddhists today in Sri Lanka regard a
yellow-robed bhikkhu in certain situations as a sign of death. And bhikkhus, especially those
who adhere to the ancient ideal of the rag-robe, are constantly reminded by the robes on their
backs that they have died to the world and are close to death. And one who would meditate on
the foulness of a corpse must go alone to the cremation ground. The meditating bhikkhu,
like the candidate for initiation, dies to ordinary existence. 1393 This meditation on death
represents logical outgrowths of the thought and intention of Buddhism. Forest worldrenouncers this meditative anticipation of death 1394 could be best illuminated in the light of
sacrificial mechanism of reconcilatory victim.
Buddhist meditations on death, nothingness, voidness and emptiness should be explicated
social anthropologically, namely in terms of meditating world-renouncers dharma. Worldrenouncers meditation on the repulsivenss of food (the digestive process), the decaying states
of a dead body, the analysis of the body into its thirty-two components, and on the sensations,
emotions, and thought process of ones own body-mind lend themselves naturally to the anicca,
anatt, dukkha analysis. All these component elements and processes are perceived to be
atomistic aggregates dependent on each other for achieving existent form, a prime example of
dependent orgination (paicca amuppda), with no real or permanently self-identified self or
soul present in any part or in the whole.1395 Thus Buddhist concepts of no-self, nothingness
and emptiness are very specific world-renouncing dharma and concepts of world-renouncer.

1392

On the practice of wearing rag-robes made from cloths found in a cemetry, see Walpola Rahula, Heritage of the
Bhikkhu (New York: Grove Press, 1974), 8.
1393
Bond, Theravada Buddhisms Meditations on Death and the Symbolism of Initiatory Death, 252-3.
1394
Ibid., 256-7.
1395
King, Buddhist Meditation, 331-3.

276

There are 13 Kinds of Ascetic Practices (Dhutaga-niddesa): the refuse-rag-wearers

practice, the triple-robe-wearers practice, The alms-food-eaters practice, the house-to-houseseekers practice, the ne-sessioners practice, the bowl-food-eaters practice, the later-foodrefusers practice, the forest-dwellers practice, the tree-root-dwellers practice, the open-airdwellers practice, the charnel-ground-dwellers practice and so on. It is refuse(pasukla)
since, owing to its being found on refuse in any such place as a street, a charnel ground, or a
midden, it belongs, as it were, to the refuse in the sense of being dumped in any one of these
places. Or alternatively: like refuse it gets to a vile state, thus it is refuse (pasukla); it goes
to a vile state, is what is meant. The wearing of a refuse-[rag], which has acquired its derivative
name in this way, is refuse-[rag-wearing](pasukla). Food (bhatta) obtained later by one
who has shown that he is satisfied is called later-food (paccha-bhatta). The eating of that later
food is later-food-eating. World-renouncer should get a robe of one of the following kinds: one
from a charnel ground, one from a shop, a cloth from a street, a cloth from a midden, one from a
childbed, an ablution cloth, a cloth from a washing place, one worn going to and returning from
[the charnel ground, and so on. There are the three kinds of refuse-rag wearers: the strict, the
medium, and the mild. Herein, one who takes it only from a charnel ground is strict. An
ablution cloth is one that people who are made by devil doctors to bathe themselves, including
their heads, are accustomed to throw away as a cloth of ill luck.1396
World-renouncer should dwell on the outskirts of a village, in a temple, in an empty
house or at the foot of a tree. He should not wander about [within] the sight of domestic
animals.1397 World-renouncer lived the pattern of life basically limited to the forest and never
encroaching on the village.1398 They stay away from villages but not too far away, for instance,
at the border of the village, and they enter the village at certain times to beg.1399 These places of
world-renouncers are either outside or on the edge of society, reflecting the world-renouncers
marginal status.1400 Buddhist monasteries were located usually at traffic junctions somewhat
off the main settlements. This corresponds to the recommendation not to take too close nor
too far from a village. With the spread of Buddhism in India, the monks also preferred to settle
in prehistoric burial sites .1401
This complex relationship between world-renouncer and worldly householder can be
regarded in the light of the metonymic relationship between members of the community and
reconcilatory victims discussed in Girard theory. f the reconcilatory victim is to polarize the
aggressive tendencies of the community and effect their transfer to himself, continuity must be

1396

Bhadantcariya Buddhaghosa, The Path of Purification(Visuddhimagga). Volume One (Berkeley/London:

Shambhala, 1976), 60-4.
1397
Vsiha Dharmas tra X. 16.
1398
Shiraishi, Asceticism in Buddhism and Brahmanism. A Comparative Study, 94.
1399
Ibid., 134.
1400
Hartsuiker, Sdhus : holy men of India, 72.
1401
Kieffer-Plz, Die buddhistische Gemeinde, 323.

277

maintained. There must also be discontinuity. The victim must be neither too familiar to the
community nor too foreign to it. Girard noted that this ambiguity is essential to the cathartic
functioning of the sacrifice. If the victim is drawn from outside the community if the very fact
of choosing a victim bestows on him an aura of exteriority the reason is hat the surrogate
victim is not perceived as he really was- namely, as a member of the community like all the
others. Ritual requires the sacrifice of a victim as similar as possible to the monstrous double.
The marginal categories from which these victims are generally drawn barely fulfill this
requirement, but they, for Girard, provide the least unsatisfactory compromise. Situated as they
are between the inside and the outside, they can perhaps be said to belong to both the interior
and the exterior of the community. The victim should belong both to the inside and the outside
of the community.1402
World-renunciation is, as Olivelle has pointed out, defined as an essentially negative and
even antinomian state, in practice, however, the renouncers way of life was regarded by clear
rules and characterized by established patterns of behavior. Constant itinerancy and the absence
of a stable residence characterize the daily life of a renouncer. World-renouncers roam about
like a worm (Nradaparivrjaka Upaniad 181). Renouncers were vagabonds, and their
homelessness, just like their refusal to use fire, was a symbol of their separation from society
that values stable residence. They are further required not to ask for directions as they wander;
their wandering is aimless. They are not traveling anywhere. They are pilgrims without a
destination. Life in the wilderness defines the renouncers life in opposition to the ritual life of
the householder lived in the village.1403 Sacrificial practices ensure the purgation of violence, its
transference to victims whose relationship to the community is neither too close nor too distant;
who are, in short, suitable figures for relieving the community of its burden of violence and
effecting its purification.1404

6.8. Tapas as Expiation

We can deepen the sacrificial interpretation of the world-renunciation, tapas and yogic
meditation by examining it from the perspectives of Girardian theory on the mechanism of
reconcilatory victims. Tapas (ascetic practices) that literally means heat and is related with the
interiorization of sacrificial fire, is understood as a expiation. The performance of vows of
asceticism was a part of the traditional expiation for sexual sins. For this reason, the wanderings
of iva as a Kplika, particularly in the Pine Forest, may be considered expiations for his well1402
1403
1404

Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 271-2.

Olivelle, Sanysa Upani ads. Hindu Scriptures on Asceticism and Renunciation, 101-3.
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 278.

278

known lustfulness, as well as for the acts of violence which are their ostensible cause. His
violation of the sages wives is a re-enactment of the original sin which forced iva to undertake
the expiation. The tradition of tapas as expiation for sexual transgression thus contributes to the
image of the erotic ascetic.1405 The brahmacrin who seduces his gurus wife must spend a year
wearing bark garments and performing tapas in a lonely forest; a similar expiation is prescribed
for one who has accidentally commited incest or had relations with his stepmother. A man
should perform tapas if he feels lust, a clear suggestion of the sexual nature of the ascetic; and if
an ascetic makes love to a woman because of lust, he must torture himself with yogic breathing
exercises, while another kind of breathing exercise, together with a fast, is prescribed for the
ascetic who spills his seed by looking at a woman.1406
There was also the belief that the rite of world-renunciation wipes away all sins and
impurities, even those accumulated over many births. World-renunciation burns up all sins,
whether they are incurred through birth or commited by ones own action, as a chaff-fire (burns
up the impurities of) gold. World-renunciation qua talis causes a man to be reborn in the
highest of the heavenly worlds, viz. the world of Brahm.1407 The yogic practice of breath
control and retention (prayma) is one of the most practised acts of expiation (Shneakte).
Through the yogic practice of breath retention, one can be released from all consequences of sin,
including brahmanicide. The genuine tool of expiation (Shnemittel) is Tapas (literally
meaning heat). Tapas means all kinds of the systematic bodily austerities, asceticism. It is
generally said that tapas rapidly burns all sins.1408
At early time there is a connection between the postures of yoga and sexuality. The
interrelation of asceticism and desire must be accepted as a unified concept which has been
central to Indian thought from prehistoric times. Similarly, iva is ithyphallic as Narj, as the
androgyne, and frequently when sitting in a yogic posture beside Prvat, whose hand
sometimes touches his erect phallus. Even Gaea, the son of iva, has the rdhvaliga (erect
phallus) when he dances the dance of death (tava) in imitation of his father. It has been
suggested that several of the bearded figures potrayed on the aiva temples at Khajuraho are
yogis participating in ritual orgies, and that some of their more convoluted poses represent
sexo-yogic attitudes or esoteric yogic sanas (postures).1409
Girard theory provides an answer to the resolution of ivas mythological contradictions
(The Paradox: iva The Erotic Ascetic ). According to OFlaherty, paradox is the very heart
of aiva mythology. Since Western scholarship first became aware of Hindu mythology, the
character of iva, the archetypal world-renouncer, has remained an einigma. The mythology of

1405

Wendy Doniger OFlaherty, Asceticism and Sexuality in the Mythology of iva, Part II, in History of
Religions 9/1 (1969), 36-7.
1406
OFlaherty, iva. The Erotic Ascetic, 57.
1407
Olivelle, "Ritual Suicide and the Rite of Renunciation," 40-4.
1408
Klostermaier, Der Hinduismus, 139-40.
1409
OFlaherty, iva. The Erotic Ascetic, 9.

279

iva was considered contradictory and paradoxical. iva, the creator and the destroyer, life and
death, the coincidentia oppositorum. iva himself is said to be troubled by the ambivalence in
his character.1410 We have already found the mythological representation of persecution in
ivas mythology, in asectis practices (tapas) as expiation, and in the liminal, ambivalent and
paradxical life of yogic world-renouncer. The paradox of erotic (transgressive) ascetic can be
well explained by the paradox of the god (a reconcilatory victim) who is helpful because he is
harmful, a force of order because he creates disorder.1411
The classical pattern of the myth of the ascetic seduced by a prostitute is an important theme
in Indian literature, as, indeed, in many other literatures. OFlaherty has corectly pointed out
that the necessity for a prostitute as the partner of the yogic world-renouncer is not merely a
result of the metaphysics of the conjunction of opposites, of the representatives of tapas and
kma, but in part a consequence of the simple logistics of the necessary plot. The actual
sexual act constitutes the technical breaking of his vow.1412 This technical breaking of his
vow can be best understood in the light of mechanisms of undifferentiations that Girard saw in
myths when trying to understand archaic religion. Both iva and Prvat transgress the normal
social order to unite the superficially opposed elements of tapas and kma.1413 Girard argues
that the unwillingness to acknowledge the paradox of the sovereign victim tends to efface
exactly what the victim represents, the truth of the founding violence.1414

6.9. Forest World-Renouncer and its Domestication

The radical world-renouncers technical or simulated breaking of vows and transgression is
related also with the courting dishonor from the community. Olivelle has dealt with the themes
of Courting Dishonor: Madness and Acting like Animals: A saying that recurs frequently in
Upaniads is that a world-renouncer should wander about the earth like a worm. The analogy of
a worm is quite appropriate, because like a worm a renouncer is expected to go about unnoticed
one the one hand, and despised on the other. A renouncer is thus instructed not merely to avoid
praise and honor but to actively court dishonor and insults.1415

1410

Wendy Doniger OFlaherty, Asceticism and Sexuality in the Mythology of iva, part I, in History of
Religions 8/4 (1969), 300-6.
1411
Girard, The Scapegoat, 84.
1412
OFlaherty, Asceticism and Sexuality in the Mythology of iva, part I, 313-4, 319.
1413
OFlaherty, Asceticism and Sexuality in the Mythology of iva, part II, 35.
1414
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 67.
1415
Regarding the praise of courting dishonor, see Daniel H. H. Ingalls, Cynics and Pupatas: The Seeking of
Dishonor, Harvard Theological Review 55(1962) 281-298; Minoru Hara, A Note on the Pupata Concept of
Purity(aucha), Svasti ri: Dr. B. Ch. Chhabra Felicitation Volume, ed. K. V. Ramesh et al. (Delhi : Agam Kala

280

He should find satisfaction when people insult him and maltreat him. World-renouncers
are also instructed to assume the appearance of and to behave like madmen. The Jbla, for
example, says that renouncers, although they are sane, behave like madmen. A worldrenouncer shall roam like a fool. The three terms that recur with some frequency in this context
are bla, unmatta, and pica. The first can mean both a madman and a child; in either case it
indicates behavior that goes against adult and rational norms. Unmatta can mean a lunatic and a
man who is intoxicated, both symbols of irrational and improper behavior. Pca is a class of
demonic beings who delight in eating raw flesh and who elicit feelings of disgust and
loathing.1416
Mechanism of mimetic reconciliation polarized around the victim seems to provide a
compelling set of answers to the questions of world-renouncers courting dishonor and insult.
The victim who absorbs the internal dissension in the community. Like Oedipus, the
reconcilatory victim is considered a polluted object, whose living presence contaminates
everything that comes in contact with it and whose death purges the community of its ills- as the
subsequent restoration of public tranquility clearly testifies. That is why the pharmakos (Greek
human scapegoat) was paraded about the city. He was used as kind of sponge to sop up
impurities, and afterward he was expelled from the community or killed in a ceremony that
involved the entire populace. The pharmakos, like Oedipus himself, has a dual connotation. On
the one hand he is a woebegone figure, an object of scorn who is also weighed down with guilt;
a butt for all sorts of gibes, insults, and of course, outbursts of violence. On the other hand, he is
surrounded by a quasi-religious aura of veneration. The victim has become a sort of cult object.
This quality reflects the metamorphosis the ritual system is designed to effect; the victim draws
to itself all the violence and through its own death transforms this baneful violence into
beneficial violence, into harmony and abundance. It is not surprising that the word pharmakon
in classical Greek means both poision and the antidote for poison, both sickness and cure in
short, any substance capable of perpetrating a very good or very bad action, according to the
circumstances and the dosage.1417
The Korean mad monk Jun-kwangs bestiality was known. Did you have sex with
animals ? Yes, Jun-kwang answered, all sentient beings have the Buddha nature. Why
make distinctions ? In another dialogue, this Korean mad and transgressive world-renouncer
explains: I never hurt anyone by my actions. I am a Buddhist mop. A mop is something that
gets dirty itself but makes everything it touches clean .1418 The reconcilatory victim absorbs all
the internal tensions, feuds, and rivalries pent up within the community and is capable of
attracting the violent impulses to itself.
Prakashan, 1984), 237-244. See also David H. Lorenzen, The Kplikas and Klmukhas: Two Lost aivite Sects
(Berkeley: University of California Press 1972).
1416
Olivelle, Sanysa Upaniads. Hindu Scriptures on Asceticism and Renunciation, 107-9.
1417
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 95.
1418
Jung-kwang, The Mad Monk: Paitings of Unlimited Action, ed. Lewis R. Lancaster (Berkeley: Lancaster-Miller.
1979), 10 (cited in Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy. A Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism, 242).

281

Imitating animals, acting mad, and seeking dishonor by loathsome conduct clearly have
complex sociological, psychological, and theological reasons and causes. One reason is the
seeking of dishonor from society.1419 Therefore, criminal gods in Hinduism and Buddhism
if we can take the term criminal metaphorically-can be considered as reconcilatory victims.
The transgressive gods violate the sacred codes and boundaries by which other gods, and
humans, would seek to live. What is specific to the criminal gods of Hinduism is the
specifically Indian codes they violate societal, sexual, theological, culinary, sacrificial and
the ways they violate them.1420
The reconcilatory victim must reincarnate monstrous double. In order to cut the victim off
from the community, he is required to commit an act of incest, thereby absorbing an
enormous charge of maleficent sacredness. At the end of the period of sacrificial preparation the
victim has taken on both the interior and the exterior qualities that are required to transform him
into a sacred monster.1421 The festive and Dionysian world-renouncer as specialist of the sacred
could be thought of as representing the nondifferential character of the crisis in Girards
theory. Violence and nondifference are presented in magnified and highly concentrated form,
but limited to a single individual. According to Girard, the whole process of mythical
formulation leads to a transferal of violent undifferentiation from all the Thebans to the
person of Oedipus, a prime example of the human scapegoat. Oedipus becomes the repository
of all the communitys ills. In the myth, the fearful transgression of a single individual is
substituted for the universal onslaught of reciprocal violence.1422
In the sense of Girardian theory of the violent origins of human society and ritual origin of
civilization, we can trace the violent origins of world-constructing world-renunciation and
civilizing world-renouncer. World renunciation in India did not always remain on good terms
with society-oriented ideologies. It took a long period of domestication for the renunciatory
ideals to be incorporated into the fabric of mainstream religion, and even this incorporation, as
the evidence of the Sanysa Upaniads themselves demonstrates, did not altogether erase their
irresolvable conflict.

1423

The original and radical world-renouncer was gradually

domesticated. Therefore, there have been the reform movements, attempting to regain the
original Buddhist way of life in the face of the ubiquitous domestication of the monkhood.
The later dichotomy of (domesticated) village-dwelling and (original and radical) forestdwelling monks is the result of this process of domestication. These Buddhist reform
movements have periodically re-vivified and re-embodied the old sasra-nirva dichotomy,

1419

Olivelle, Sanysa Upani ads. Hindu Scriptures on Asceticism and Renunciation, 111.
Alf Hiltebeitel (ed), Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on the Gods of Popular Hinduism, ed. (New
Delhi: Manohar, 1989), 1.
1421
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 271-2.
1422
Ibid., 77.
1423
Olivelle, Sanysa Upani ads. Hindu Scriptures on Asceticism and Renunciation, 20.
1420

282

once the charisma of the nirva-seeking renouncer has been routinsed into the figure of the
monk as parish priest, officiant at funeral and sundry merit-making rituals.

1424

This process of domestication (domesticating wandering monks)1425 could be explained

in terms of generative mechanism in Girards theory. Contrary to common belief that the
principle of animal domestication is economic, Girard argues that an immediate motive, being
powerful and permanent enough to encourage treating animals in such a way as to ensure their
eventual domestication, was sacrifice. Domestication of animals originated in sacrifice. The
monstrous qualities attributed to the victim allow us to suppose that it is replacement might be
easily have been sought among animals as among men. The victim will serve as mediator
between the community and the sacred, between the inside and the outside. In order to polarize
effectively the malevolent aspects of communal life, the victim must differ from members of the
community but also resemble them. We have already noted that the sacred and liminal worldrenouncers differ rom the worldly householder but also have some relationship with them. With
animals, it is therefore necessary for the victim to live among members of the community and
adopt their customs and characteristic habits. This explains, for Girard, the delay, in many
rituals, between the time of choosing the victim and the time of the sacrifice. Girard asserts that
this sacrificial delay played an enormous role in cultural development. It is responsible for the
existence of domestic animals, just as it is for so-called political power. Therefore, the economic
motive is not sufficient to explain domestication of animals, but sacrifice can result in economic
practices that gradually become independent of their origin, as in the political development of
kingship.1426
Taking into account the derivative character of all differentiated institutions, such as
monarchy, human sacrifice, animal sacrifice, animal worship, cannibalism, etc., Girard
maintains that they derive from a single, ubiquitous intention to reproduce reconciliation by
means of sacrifice, which in turn is the process that eventually produces cultural institutions.1427
The violent paradox of world-constructing world-renunciation can be illuminated by the
creative role of sacrifice in human culture. For Girard, sacrifice became a means for exploring
the world. It operated somewhat like scientific research operates in the modern world.1428
The following Buddhist agricultural metaphors could be understood in the light of Girards
explanation of the sacrificial origins of agriculture. A Buddhist world-renouncer is a fertile
and productive field of merit. Chief among these Buddhist agricultural metaphors is the notion
that the Sangha (world-renouncers) is the most fertile field of merit, while offering that are
given to the sangha are like seeds. This is a common metaphor throughout the Buddhist world.
The Sangha is the best field in which to plant a seed of meirt. According to this common
1424
1425

291.
1426
1427
1428

Collins, Selfless Persons: Imagery and Thought in Theravada Buddhism, 265.

Taylor, Forest Monks and the Nation-State: An Anthropological and Historical Study in Northeastern Thailland,
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 68-72.
Ibid.
Ibid., 71.

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metaphor, even the smallest seeds planted in the Sanghas great merit field produce a great
bounty in the form of karmic and spiritual abundance. The whole concept is based on an
agricultural metaphor. The lay person is like a farmer, his or her act is like a seed. Seeds
planted in the great field of merit will grow. With accumulated merit, the donor can avoid
treading the dangerous path of birth-and-death. Intimately connected to ideas of karmic
retribution, merit provided a possible escape from karma, or at the least, a means of erasing bad
karma. The agricultural metaphors used by Buddhists were always abundant. Citing Michel
Serres, Girard argues that that the Indo-European word for to plant, i.e., pak from which
words like paysage, pays, pagan, paysan, (the signs of civilization), stem also refers to the
tomb as the first sign, as the first human symbolic inscription. Girard asks what could have
given to the human being the idea of putting seeds into the ground ? They, for Girard, buried
them hoping they would resurrect like the community as a result of sacrifice. In accounting for
the relationship between sacrificial rites and agriculture, Girard insists that in many societies
they were thinking of ritual in terms of vegetation dying and being reborn. Girard thinks it is
more than a metaphor. According to Girard, when human beings started to bury seeds as they
did with human beings, in order to hope for their resurrection it actually happened, that is, that
the seeds came to life again. This discovery was very likely to have been made around the
sacred burial sites in which any symbolic activitiy of the primitive community was carried out
(such as burying seeds along with human beings, for instance).1429
We have already elaborated on the ambiguity and ambivalence of forest and wild worldrenouncer from the viewpoint of surrogate victim mechanism. For Girard, the sacrificial victim
ought to be at the same time different and similar to the members of the community. This
question touches on the problem of the incomplete separation of the outside/inside structure.
It is rather a continuum. The sacred is always outside, for it has to have transcendence in order
to be sacred. This, according to Girard, seems to confirm that wild animals were domesticated
for the purpose of sacrifice rather than domestification. I may also say that wild animals were
first sacrificed and then domesticated. The theology of the cow in India seems to suggest this:
this cow is in a kind of grey zone between sacredness and domestication. It has become
domesticated because it was needed in sacrificial rituals, but then as the sacrificial ritual was
progressively abandoned, the animal never reached a secularized status: it became edible, but
remained invested with a sacred aura. The victim is both outsider and insider. It is ambiguous
and ambivalent, which explains why human outsiders might be selected as well as animal
insiders, such as domesticated animals, who have almost (but not quite) turned into members of
the community.1430

7. Dialectic between World-Renunciation and World Order

1429
1430

Girard, Evolution and Conversion. Dialogues on the Origins of Culture, 119-121.

Ibid., 118-9.

284

7.1. Buddha Bad Karma

Not only in the thema of ivas transgressive brahmanicide, but also in the theme of
Buddhas bad karma, we can find out this represented sign of the reconcilatory victim.
Buddhas bad karma and his undifferentiating crime are also to be comprehended as a crime of
reconciliatory victims: Buddha and the monks were forced to eat inferior food as the result of
bad karma which the monks accumulated during one of the Buddhas previous lives.1431
The Buddha describes twelve previous lives in which he performed evil deeds, and states
that these deeds resulted in great suffering.1432 It was karmically determined not only that
Buddha would perform painful austerities but also that in a previous life he would slander a
Buddha! Not only this Buddha, but also previous Buddhas too suffered bad karma. 1433
Buddhas bad karma of his slandering an innocent Pratyekabuddha in a former life, of his
slandering a bhiku of six psychic powers in a previous life out of jealousy, of murdering his
brother for wealth in a former birth, of killing a visiting wrestler in a match, of knocking over
the bowl of a Pratyekabuddha, and of his reviling the Buddha Kyap saying, Bald headed
rmaa, enlightenment is difficult to obtain,1434 all these bad karma is to be interpreted as
transgressive and undifferentiating crimes of reconciliatory victims.
In general, enlightened men are said to be still affected by the results of their past bad
karma, although they create no new karma: the most famous example is of Moggallna, one of
the Buddhas chief disciples, who- though enlightened died a violent death as a result of
having killed his parents in a former life.1435 To the Jains, also such afflictions that the ascetic
has to endure are not accidental and random, but derive from violence committed in a previous
existence, or even earlier on in the same life.1436 As the gods age, their evil dimension becomes,
according to Girard, blurred to the advantage of their beneficent side, but vestiges of the original
demon always remain. If we are content to repeat the standard clichs about the Olympian gods,
we will see only their majesty and their serenity. In classical art the positive elements are
generally in the foreground, but behind them, even in the case of Zeus, there are the wild
pranks of the god, as they are called with an indulgence. Everyone agrees to excuse these
escapades with a knowingly complicit smile. In reality the wild pranks are the traces of crimes
similar to those of Oedipus and other divinized scapegoats: parricide, incest, bestial fornication,
and the other horrible crimes. The wild pranks are, for Girard, essential to the primitive

1431
1432
1433
1434
1435
1436

Walters, The Buddha's Bad Karma: A Problem in the History of Theravada Buddhism, 83.
Ibid., 76.
Ibid., 87.
Guang Xing, The Bad Karma of the Buddha, in Buddhist Studies Review 19, no. 1 (2002), 19-29.
Collins, Selfless Persons: Imagery and Thought in Theravada Buddhism, 207.
Hardy, The Religious Culture of India. Power, Love and Wisdom, 176.

285

phenomenon of divinity.1437 The indifferentiating crimes of Bodhisattvas seem to be excused in

the name of skillful means. The whole idea of bad karma is rejected and considered as a skillful
means (upyakaualya) of the Buddha to save sentient beings.1438
Girard's formulations concerning mythic accusation against the reconcilatory victim seem
insightful as to the theme of Buddhas bad karma. Buddhas bad karma as well as ivas
brahamanicide might be understood as a crime attributed to the founding victim that makes
them a culprit, a parricidal and incestuous son, for example, in the style of the Greek Oedipus.
This accusation must have been effaced with time, and this effacement is inscribed in the
general course of evolution toward the religiously correct which sooner or later characterizes
any enduring culture. Everything that in the genesis of the religious order is unsettling, anything
that might potentially reveal the founding violence, was gradually effaced. The transcendental
dimension of the myth is supposed to replace the real motive that has vanished, but this is only a
late rearrangement of the facts, modified by ritual wear and tear, by the leveling down of all
violence. The mythic accusation falls by the wayside, and all that remains in old and exhausted
systems is veneration of the divinized victim.1439
Mythological transformation moves in only one direction, toward the elimination of any
traces of violence. Like the Buddha, Bodhisattvas did not always act in predictable or straitlaced
fashion in teaching others the path. Indeed, when the bodhisattvas upya is coupled with the
freedom that comes from their liberating vision of the Perfection of Wisdom, the result could
sometimes be rather eccentric behavior, prototypical, perhaps, of Zen masters or Tibetan
gurus.1440 Though early Mahayana Buddhism attempted to limit such extreme forms of upaya
to only Buddhas and advanced Bodhisattvas, the allowance for the violation of sanctions against
killing opened the door in the Mahayana to broader justifications of violence. And in the hand
of Buddhists apparently less advanced on the religious path, this loophole has, ironically, led
to violence perpetrated in the name of compassion and skillful means.1441
The evolution of mythology, Girard asserts, is governed by the determination to eliminate
any representation of violence. Greek and Roman mythology, are all pursuing the same goal: the
elimination of the very last traces of traces. Platos attitude provides a significant example of
this new stage. His intention to remove any trace of mythological violence is quite explicit in
the Republic. The determination to eliminate all violence, by its very explicitness, becomes a
form of censorship, a deliberate mutilation of the mythological text. What Plato calls the
theology of the poets ist that very primitive dual quality of the sacred which unites blessed with
cursed.1442
The sacrificial process requires a certain degree of misunderstanding. The secret of the
1437

Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning , 74.

Xing, The Bad Karma of the Buddha, 25.
1439
Girard, Le sacrifice, 37-8.
1440
Strong, The Experience of Buddhism: Sources and Interpretations, 172.
1441
Christopher Ives, Dharma and Deconstruction, in Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture 9
(2002), 160.
1442
Girard, The Scapegoat, 76-8.
1438

286

mechanism of sacralization lies in the sacred misunderstanding regarding reconciliatory victims.

For Girard, the expression scapegoat is not a concept like others but something paradoxical, a
principle of illusion whose efficacy requires complete ignorance of it. To have a scapegoat is
not to know that one has one. As soon as the scapegoat is revealed and named as such, it loses
its power. A scapegoat Oedipus remains defined by his double crime. Girard argues that by
making this hero the symbol of the human condition, Freud does no more than rejuvenate and
universalize the eternal lie of mythology.1443 Buddhist modernists seek to reinterpret the
Buddhas life in more historistic and rationalistic terms. By demythologizing the story of the
Buddhas life these nineteenth and twentieth century interpreters have sought to emphasize the
Buddhas humanity, and to highlight his social concerns. 1444 Therefore, the mythological
dimension of the themes concerning Buddhas bad karma must not be overlooked.
For Girard, gods must be neither criminals nor victims and because they are recognized as
scapegoats, their acts of violence and criminality the signs that point to them as victims
including the crisis itself, must be gradually eliminated. Sometimes the meaning of the crisis is
inverted, and the lack of distinction is endowed with the utopian sense. The complaints of
Plato, according to Girard, should not be taken lightly, nor those of Euripides, who also wanted
to reform the gods. They reflect the disintegration of the primitive notion of the sacred, the
tendency toward dualism that only wants to retain the beneficient aspect of the gods. By this act
of relegation he transfigures the original crisis into an idyll and a utopia. Girard points out the
mythological tendency to idealize, transforms or effaces all the stereotypes: the crisis, the
signs that indicate a victim, collective violence, and of course the victims crime. There was a
very strong tendency, especially in Greek mythology, to minimize and even suppress the
crimes of the gods long before Plato and the philosophers articulated the concept. The Olympian
gods of classical Greece are no longer victims, but they still commit most of the stereotypical
crimes that would justify putting the guilty person to death in other mythologies. When Zeus
turns into a swan to become Ledas lover we do not think of the crime of bestiality, when the
Minotaur marries Pasiphae we think nothing of it, or at most consider the auther in bad taste.
Aesthetic and poetic treatment, according to Girard, lends itself to a million and one ways of
elaborating on the stereotypes of persecution or of concealing anything that might reveal the
original scapegoat mechanism that created the text. The Aristotelian notion of hamartia
conceptualizes the poetic minimization of the crime. It suggests simple negligence, a fault by
omission rather than the fullness of evil of the ancient myths.1445
Girard acknowledges the structural similarities between the gospel enactment and the
basic workings of all other religions. These analogies are, for Girard, real ones.1446 Jesus, as
Jean-Michel Oughourlian has formulated, provides the scapegoat par excellence. In Jesus the
1443
1444

Girard, Le sacrifice, 55.

Frank Reynolds and Mani B. Reynolds, Three Worlds According to King Ruang: A Thai Buddhist Cosmology,

20.
1445
1446

Girard, The Scapegoat, 78-81.

Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 217.

287

victim par excellence, the previous history of mankind is summed up, concluded and
transcended. 1447 The only true scapegoats are those we cannot recognize as such. By
submitting to violence, Christ reveals and uproots the structural matrix of all religion.1448
Christ and Bodhisattvas are also different. The Christ, because of the scandal of particularity,
must be unique while Bodhisattvas are manifold. While Christians are traditionally exhorted to
be like Christ, Buddhists are called to be Bodhisattvas.1449
The essential difference between the uniqueness of Christ and the plurality of Bodhisattvas
is not to be overlooked. Unlike Christianity and Islam, the historicity of a unique founding
figure is not intrinsic in Buddhism: all Buddhas and Bodhisattvas are the same and
interchangeable. The idea of a plurality of Buddhas is common.1450 Gautama, indeed, is
reported to have emphaticaly disowned the authorship of new teaching, but claimed to be the
follower of a doctrine established long ago by the former Buddhas.1451
The same story is repeated in all past and future Buddhas. This explains the extreme
monotony of these lives, all based on the same model. The same can be said, in part, of the
lives of the Buddhist saints, which are also imitations of the life of the Buddha. All are said to
have passed through the same stages as the Buddha: a world-renunciation, an ascetic existence
leading to awakening, the acquisition of extraordinary powers, jealousy caused by success and
criticism of a society, death foretold, and funeral that gives rise to the worship of relics. Faure
has rightly questioned where does the belief in a historical Buddha come from ? What does
this belief signify and how can it be reconciled with the proliferation of metaphysical
buddhas associated with the Mahyna tradition ? Westerns (as well as certain Westernized
Asians), according to Faure, first developed a firm belief in the historical authenticity of the
Buddha during the nineteenth century at a time when triumphant rationalism was seeking an
alternative to Christianity.1452
Girard speaks of the paradox of the scapegoat. To understand that the scapegoat, far from
being guilty, is innocent, non-pertinent, is to destroy its power of structuration; it is to truly
demythify myths, or deconstruct them. No text structured by a scapegoat phenomenon can
reveal the mechanism that structures it.1453
Heroic virtue separates the Bodhisattva from ordinary human beings. Too extreme selfimmolation of tragic heroes (Bodhisattvas) can be interpreted in terms of the sacrificial system
of mythological representation based on the false transcendence of a victim who is made
sacred.1454 The self-immolation of Bodhisattvas for the sake of all living beings sounds too
1447
1448
1449
1450
1451
1452
1453
1454

Ibid., 209.
Ibid., 178-9.
Lopez and Rockefeller (ed), The Christ and the Bodhisattva, 39.
Collins, Selfless Persons: Imagery and Thought in Theravda Buddhism, 274.
G.C, Pande, Studies in the Origins of Buddhism (University of Allahabad, 1957), 36.
Bernard Faure, Unmasking Buddhism, 14-6.
Girard, Le sacrifice, 59-60.
Girard, The Scapegoat, 166.

288

extreme to our ears.1455 The language of Bodhisattvas vows is consistent with the hyperbolic
images of the legends and proportionate to the heroic scale of the Bodhisattva ideal.1456 The
self-sacrifice performed by Bodhisattvas are jumping from a cliff, self-immolation, and cutting
oneself into pieces. These practices of self-sacrifice are said to be for the purpose of
enlightening sentient beings to realize Buddhahood.1457
World-renouncer pratyekabuddhas (Buddhist saint of the highest order) may choose their
own time of death and even be the agents of it. Mount Mahpapta in the Himalayas is known
as a place where pratyekabuddhas may enter final nirvna by throwing themselves down from a
precipice. When the praytekabuddha has passed into final nirvna, his body is to be honored
with flowers, perfumes, and so on. When a king of Banaras is shown the body of a
pratyekabuddha who has just entered parinirvna, he performs pj to it. Sometimes the
pratyekabubdha may be the agent of his own cremation. As an example of this, five hundered
pratyekabuddhas enter final nirvna at the time of the birth of the Buddha. After the
pratyekabuddhas passing and cremation, his relics are collected and made the object of cultic
veneration. The stpa of a pratyekabuddha is to be placed in a prominent location, such as the
place where four roads cross. The Chinese pilgrims report visiting the stpas of
pratyekabuddhas. These were particularly understood to possess special powers of protection,
and images of pratyekabuddhas were used to ward off negative influences and afford protection.
It is said that there is some connection of the pratyekabuddha with a Sinhalese(P.) paritta
ceremony.1458
Just like stoning, falling from a high cliff has originally collective, ritual, and penal
connotations. This was a widespread practice among both ancient and primitive societies. It is a
kind of sacrificial immolation. Rome had its Tarpeian rock. In the Greek universe the ritual
pharmakos (human scapegoat) was periodically put to death in the same way, especially in
Marseille. The unfortunate man was made to throw himself into the sea from such a height that
death was inevitable. 1459 The advantage of this sacrificial immolation is that the entire
community participates in the execution and no one is exposed to pollution or contact with the
victim. This same advantage figures in orther types of capital execution in archaic societies.1460
The ritual confirmation of the Bodhisattva ideal is the reenactment of the Bodhisattva myth.
Mythic or celestial Bodhisattvas act as models for human behavior. The heroic and tragic selfsacrifice of mythic Bodhisattvas acts as models for the self-sacrifice in Buddhist history. The
vogue of self-immolations through fire has been well studied in the Indian and Chinese
contexts.1461
1455

Gmez, From the Extraordinary to the Ordinary: Images of the Bodhisattva in East Asia, 153.
Ibid., 169.
1457
Cheng-mei Ku, The Mahssaka View of Women, in Buddhist Thought and Ritual, ed. David J. Kalupahana
(New York: Paragon House, 1991), 167.
1458
Ray, Buddhist Saints in India. A Study in Buddhist Values & Orientations, 227-30.
1459
Girard, The Scapegoat, 176.
1460
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 107-8.
1461
Faure, Visions of Power. Imagining Medieval Japanese Buddhism, 206.
1456

289

Unlike Christ, there are some the Dionysian in the mythic story of Bodhisattvas. Many
Buddhist story seem to assert the superiority of transgression, its status as proof of
awakening.1462 The concept of pivoting or inversion (paravtti) seems to underlie the
notion according to which, instead of rejecting desire and sexuality, it is better to transmute
them through meditation. According to Faure, the logic of transcendence that characterizes
Buddhist concentration and wisdom implies, in its very principle, a transgression of all fixed
rules. Such an inversion is precisely what allows the boddhisattva to consumate the sexual
act without being defiled by it.1463 Buddhist philosophy representing world-renouncers logic,
dharma and philosophy as a tragic hero could be thought of as a representation of the sacrificial
crisis and the generative violence. For Girard, Greek tragedy, like the festival and indeed all
other rites, is primarily a representation of the sacrificial crisis and the generative violence.1464
We can affirm considerable positive potential of Bodhisattva (decontextualized and
Westernized) Bodhisattva ethics. Based on some stereotypes of western Buddhism, Leo D.
Lefebure has pointed out some meditative devotional wisdom and potentials.1465 A specific
literary genre, the so-called meditative devotional literature is popularized and positioned in
a field of interfaith relationships.1466 In spite of some devotional value from the radical
altruism of heroic and mythic Bodhisattvas,1467 the hidden sacrificial is not to be neglected. In
order to retain its structuring influence the generative violence must remain hidden. For
Girard, misapprehension is indispensable to all religious or postreligious structuring.1468
Dumoulin has rightly highlighted the fundamental difference between Christian charity
and the altruism of Bodhisattvas. 1469 Through the radical anthropological rereading and
hermeneutics of suspicion, I have deconstructed the mythological and the Dionysian
surrounding the tragic heroes Bodhisattvas from Girards standpoint concerning genetic
mechanism of culture. This structuring mechanism is not intrinsically obscure, but it is
paradoxical from the standpoint of established perspectives, being essentially rooted in the
delusions of unanimous victimage.1470
Girard1471 postulates the presumed identity of all religions, but he also emphasizes the
superiority of the Judaic and Christian over other religions, and notably over the Vedic
1462

Faure, The Red Thread: Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality, 4.

Ibid., 99.
1464
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 168.
1465
Lefebure, Mimesis, Violence, and Socially Engaged Buddhism: Overture to a Dialogue, 121-40.
1466
U. Berner, C. Bochinger and K. Hock, Das Christentum aus der Sicht der Anderen zur Einfhrung, in Das
Christentum aus der Sicht der Anderen. Religionswissenschaftliche und missionswissenschaftliche Beitrge, ed. U.
Berner, C. Bochinger and K. Hock (Frankfurt am Main: Verlag Otto Lembeck, 2005), 13.
1467
Perry Schmidt-Leukel, Den Lwen brllen hren. Zur Hermeneutik eines christlichen Verstndnisses der
buddhistischen Heilsbotschaft. Beitrge zur kumenischen Theologie 23 (Paderborn: Schningh 1992), 563.
1468
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 310.
1469
H. Dumoulin, Der Religise Heilsweg des Zen-Buddhismus und die christliche Spiritualitt, in Studia
Missionalia XII. Buddhism. Edita a Facultate Missiologica in Pont. Universitate Gregoriana. Rom. 1962, 113.
1470
Girard, "To Double Business Bound": Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology, xiv.
1471
Girard, Le sacrifice, 53-9.
1463

290

tradition. For Girard, the Vedic tradition, indicating a rigorous, often subtle thought, but
remains within the sacrificial framework and is always interpreted in mythic fashion. The
Vedic tradition, for Girard,1472 is rooted in scapegoat phenomena that remain undeciphered
and inseparable from the sacrificial illusion. Through the socio-anthropological explication of
the Buddhist philsophy of nothingness, we have already uncovered this structuring mechanism
and sacrificial illusion framework around the Dionysian world-renouncer. Christ, as Vattimo
contends, came into the world precisely to reveal and abolish the nexus between violence and
the sacred. He was put to death because such a revelation was intolerable to a humanity rooted
in the violent traditions of sacrificial religions.1473
For Girard, Christ is thus the One who raises up the divine hidden in all religions, who
frees holiness from the sacred. Both a difference and a similarity between Christianity and
Greek religion have to be taken into account. Christianity has changed the Greek religion
forever. The Christian, says Girard, raises up the archaic. Nietzsche clearly feels these things,
but in another way and more than 50 years later. Nietzsche wanted to keep opposing Dionysius
to the Crucified. The reality that Hlderlin felt, for Girard, is deeper and more mysterious:
Christ has replaced Dionysius, and thereby exposed himself to fiercer violence from the very
thing he has demystified. 1474 Both a radical difference and a similarity between kenoticapocalyptic Christ and sacred Buddhas have to be taken into consideration. The hidden
sacrificial mechanism surrounding Dionysian- yogic world-renouncing Buddhas must be
demystified (Siva as yogic world-renouncer par excellece is Indian Dionysius).

7.2. Bodhidharma as Founding Victim

Girardian founding mechanism could be read not only in the themes of Buddhas bad karma,
but also in the mysterious death of Bodhidharma who are the founding father and the first
patriarch of Zen Buddhism and the 28th patriarch of Buddhism. The figure of Bodhidharma
occupies a place comparable to that of the Buddha himself throughout Buddhist art in general.
Faure has dealt with the biographical illusion of Bodhidharma: Bodhidharmas biography is
very obscure, yet his life is relatively well known. The texts concerning Bodhidharma, Faure
argues, are considered by historians as documents that need to be interpreted using the historical
method so as to bring to light their hidden truths. Bodhidharmas mysterious death. Faure
claims that Bodhidharma should be interpreted as a textual and religious paradigm and not be
reconstructed as a historical figure or a psychological essence. Bodhidharma is contrasted with
1472
1473
1474

Ibid., 64.
Gianni Vattimo, Belief, trans. Luca D'Isanto and David Webb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 37.
Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benot Chantre, 129.

291

the dhyna master Seng-chou, whose method of meditation, although deemed of a rather
inferior type, was quite popular. This contrast, for Faure, is a typical literary device, and the
opposition between the two men was probably not so clear cut. It is reminiscent of another
famous antagonism, that of the respective founders of the so-called Northern and Southern
schools of Chan. Shen-hsiu and Hui-neng, who became paradigms of the two main types of
Chan pracitioners. The contrast between the two has been exaggerated for hagiographical
purposes. In the early Chan tradition, both Bodhidharma and Seng-chou, or Hui-neng and
Shen-Hsiu, are symmetrical figures that imply each other.1475
In this context, Faure quotes Girard: We may think here of what Ren Girard, in his book
on Violence and the Sacred, has said about antagonistic mimesis and the scapegoating
process leading to the eviction of the double, later glorified as a founder. Bodhidarmas death
remains mysterious, and some Japanese scholars have suggested that he may even have been
executed. The legend tells us that he was poisoned by jealous rivals.1476 Thus, the contrast
between Bodhidarma and Seng-chou is structurally analogous to the rivalry between Hui-neng
and Shen-hsiu, which is ist sectarian hyperbole. It reflects the opposition and
complementarity between the two levels of truth (absolute and conventional). The syntagmatic
contrast between Bodhidharma and Seng-chou is obvious from Tao-hsans notice. The
paradigmatic equivalence between them can be found in the fact that to both were considered
candidates for the position of first patriarch by the early Chan school. Thus, Seng-chou
appears as the main double of Bodhidharma: on the syntagmatic axis of the hagiographical
narrative, he is a rival, on its pradigmatic axis, he is a substitute.1477
Many literary texts, both ancient and modern, for Girard, make reference to the double, to
duality, to double vision. In The Bacchae, the monstrous double is everywhere. The most
intriguing instance of this confusion occurs during the encounter between Dionysus and
Pentheus, shortly before Pentheus is murdered that is, at the very moment when the enemy
brother is due to disappear behind the form of the monstrous double. Monstrous double makes
his appearance at the height of the crisis, just before the unanimous resolution.1478
Thus we could read the mystified scapegoating process leading to the eviction of the double,
later glorified as a founder. Most of the Buddhist schools start in relative obscurity and are
organized by a second- or third-generation successor, who, Faure argues, is in most cases the
real founder. The first patriarch is retrospectively promoted to his honorific rank in order to give
more legitimacy to the new school. He serves as a blank space on which one may project all
the necessary biographical elements. According to Faure, there is no real origin to the
patriarchal tradition, no real founder. The character who plays that role is, to use Lvi-

1475
1476
1477
1478

Bernard Faure, "Bodhidharma as Textual and Religious Paradigm," History of Religions, 25/3 (1986), 188-92.
Ibid., 193, n. 26.
Ibid., 193-6.
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 162.

292

Strausss

expression concerning myth, a virtual focus, a virtual object whose shadow

alone is real.1479
This blank space or virtual focus cound be re-read as founding victim in Girardian sense.
Not only Bodhidarma and Seng-chou are double and symmetrical figures, but also Cain and
Abel or Romulus and Remus who at once make and reveal the universal antagonism of doubles
at the height of a crisis, are doubles, two brothers or enemy twins. One of the brothers must die
in oder for the doubles to disappear, in other words in order to provide for the reappearance of
difference and the subsequent founding of the city.1480The universal spread of doubles, the
complete effacement of differences, heightening antagonism but also making them
interchangeable, is the prerequisite for the establishment of violent unanimity. For order to be
reborn, disorder must first triumph. When all differences have been eliminated and the
similarity between two figures has been achieved, we say that the antagonists are doubles.
Unanimity is reformed against and around the surrogate victim.1481
According to Faure, the lives of these three Chan masters (Bodhidharma, Seng-tsan, and
Hui-neng) are reconstructions dating from the eighth century, at a time when sectarianism was
intense. Their purpose is largely ideological. By thus abandoning at least for the founding
figures the obsolte concept of historical individuality, we, Faure claims, might get closer to
the global structure that regulates the transformations of actual biographies. 1482 This
regulating structure could be re-read in the light of Girards views on the founding mechanism.
A cultural system are founded on an act of generative violence or on unanimity minus the victim
of the generative expulsion. The founding victim must reincarnate the monstrous double and
meets his death in the guise of the monstrous double. During the mimetic crisis, the founding
victim is only one antagonist among others, a double among others, their twin enemy, until
mimetic polarization succeeds in converging all the signs of crisis and reconciliation on the
victim. The victim them becomes extremely significant and specific. The passage from the
aleatory to the specific, from the end of doubling to the return of differentiation, occurs through
the victim.1483
Thus mimetic doubles in Buddhism have to be comprehended in the light of foundig
mechanism of surrogate victim. Faure speaks of thaumaturge and the trickster in the Zen
context. The Janus-faced Wanhui, like his twin alter egos/doubles Hanshan and Shide became
a god of union (houhe). Buddhist devata figures such as Baozhi, Wanhui, Sengqie, Fu Xi,
Bodhidharma, and Budai, Faure argues, were perceived as avatars of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas.
As a mediator, the thaumaturge partake of two worlds, the two realms of nirva and sasra.
1479

Claude Lvi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked (New York: Harper & Row, 1969), 5. See Faure, "Bodhidharma
as Textual and Religious Paradigm," 197.
1480
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 39.
1481
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 79, 159.
1482
Faure, "Bodhidharma as Textual and Religious Paradigm," 198.
1483
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 49.

293

He is therefore double, Janus-like, and appears simultaneously as a renouncer and cultural hero,
as both sustaining and suverting social structure, as making and transgressing boundaries.1484
The scandal provoked by Bodhidharma (i.e. his rejection of traditional Buddhist practices)
resulted in his untimely death.1485 Bodhidharmas rejection of traditional Buddhist practices
could be interpreted as a kind of transgressive crimes of victim. Bodhidharma, Faure says,
seesm to have met with some hostility and slander. Bodhidharmas teaching evolked
hostility in China is evident from the fact that after his death, his disciple Hui-ko felt it
necessary to hide for a period. Tao-hsan concludes by saying that he does not know where
Bodhidharma died. In another section of the text, however, Tao-hsan states that Bodhidharma
died on the banks of the Lo River. For Faure, it is possible that Bodhidharma was executed
during the late Wei rebellions.1486 Concerning Bodhidharmas mysterious death, there were
another story of the poisoining of Bodhidharma occasioned by the jealousy of his rivals.1487
A number of well-known examples of koan as an enigmatic statement or illogical and
paradoxical riddle are specifically related to Bodhidharma, a Western Barbarian and a founding
victim/father. In fact, some well-known koans pose the question: What is the meaning of
Bodhidharma's coming from the West ? The story about Bodhidharma's transgressive encounter
and conversation with the Chinese Emperor became a favorite theme of Ch'an enigmatic and
illogical riddles (koans). Meditation upon seemingly irrational and insoluble riddles was one of
the techniques used by the Zen adept. These Buddhist riddles seem to be related to (the crimes
and transgressions of) Bodhidharma as founding victim. After having solved the riddle of the
sphinx, Oedipus must confront the deepest, darkest secret of all, the secret of patricide and
incest. So fearsome is this secret that even the famed seer Tiresias hesitates to reveal it. Girard
was originally trained as a medieval historian. When he later turned his attention to primitive
and classical myths, he was struck by their similarity to medieval accounts of persecutions
written from the persecutors' viewpoint. Through Girardian reading of Buddhist myths
concerning Bodhidharma, Buddhas bad karma and so on, we can read the similar stories of
sacrificial persecutions.

7.3. Bodhidharma as a Red-beared Barbarian

1484

Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy. A Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism, 101-2.

Ibid., 281.
1486
Bernard Faure, Bodhidharma, in The Encyclopedia of Religion. Volume 2 (New York: Macmillan Publishing
Company, 1987), 263.
1487
Faure, The Will to Orthodoxy. A Critical Geneology of Northern Chan Buddhism, 149, 163.
1485

294

Bodhidharma who brought Zen from the west was symbolized by a red-beared
barbarian.1488 Bodhidharma is the barbarian, the astonishing foreigner who came from India
to China with his fox-red beard, bearer of the Dharma, one who could say to the diligent
Emperor Wu that the highest merit of the practice is vast emptiness, nothing holy.1489 There is
homophone between fox and barbarian , which are pronounced hu in Chinese or ko in
Japanese and which are both used to stigmatize marginal persons. While ther term fox
generally represents an antinomianism, as we have already seen, it can also stand for genuine
freedom from all restrictions and therefore signify a buddha. In the Pi-yen lu case no. 1,
Bodhidharma crosses the Yangtze River after telling the emperor, in the epitome of Zen
iconoclasm, that the Dharma contains nothing sacred and that he does not know [his own
name]. Yan-wu comments: This wild fox spirit ! He cannot avoid embarrassment. He
crosses from west to east and back from east to west.1490
This Bodhidharmas iconoclasm should be interpreted as undifferentiating and
transgressive crime of surrogate victim. There was a bivalency in folklore images of the fox as
both good and evil. The fox is a (undifferentiating) trickster figure like other shapeshifting
animals, particularly snakes. In other tales, bodhisattva take the form of foxes which function as
catalysts leading people to the verge of a breakthrough.1491 A person is changed into a fox as
punishment or as a bodhisattvas compassionate choice. The wild fox is at once assimilated and
stigmatized. Eliminating the fox-as-unenlightenment results in the attainment of nirva.1492
Girard recognizes in the trickster one of the two great theologies to evolve as a result of the
sacralization of the scapegoat: the theology of divine caprice. Girard finds out the variations on
the theme of the minimized fault in the actions of the North American trickster and all the
deceiving gods found everywhere. This is the paradox of the god who is helpful because he is
harmful, a force of order because he creates disorder. Apart from the gods who do evil
unwittingly and the gods who are forced irresistibly to do evil, there, for Girard, is inevitably a
third solution, the god who enjoys doing evil and is amused by it. The trickster is sometimes
seen as wicked, but sometimes he is so stupid and clumsy in carrying out his mission that
accidents happen, whether he wants them to or not.1493
As noted earlier, in medieval times the word for barbarian(hu) was homophonous with the
word for fox (hu). Bodhidharma is the wily barbarian who sports, according to
1488

Heine, Putting the Fox Back in the Wild Fox Kan: The Intersection of Philosophical and Popular Religious
Elements in the Chan/Zen Kan Tradition, 270.
1489
Susan Murphy and John Tarrant, Upside-Down Zen: Finding the Marvelous in the Ordinary (Boston: Wisdom
Publications, 2006), 180.
1490
Heine, Putting the Fox Back in the Wild Fox Kan: The Intersection of Philosophical and Popular Religious
Elements in the Chan/Zen Kan Tradition, 277-8.
1491
Edward Kamens, trans., The Three Jewels: A Study and Translation of Minamoto Tamenoris Sanbe (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988), 285.
1492
Heine, Putting the Fox Back in the Wild Fox Kan: The Intersection of Philosophical and Popular Religious
Elements in the Chan/Zen Kan Tradition, 273, 278, 298, 303
1493
Girard, The Scapegoat, 84-5.

295

iconographic convention, a full beard. But the red-bearded barbarian is simultaneously

identified through the pun with the red-haired fox as a wily creature in China.1494 Redbearded barbarian has to be read as kind of the negative connotation of the mythic hero,
Bodhidharma. Thus Bodhidharma as western barbarian with his fox-red beard could be
understood in terms of founding victim in Girardian sense. The generative victim is often
foreigner banished or assassinated by the community. Oedipus is a visiting stranger. The
founding victim is a person who comes from elsewhere, a well-known stranger. He is invited to
a feast which ends with his lynching. He has done something he should not have done; his
behavior is perceived as fatal and insulting. One of his gestures was misinterpreted. If the
stranger behaves in a strange or insulting way in the eyes of his hosts. We cound detect
representations of persecution in Budhist text about Bodhidharma. The myth of Oedipus, for
Girard is not just a literary text, or a psychoanalytic text, but a persecution text and should be
interpreted as such.1495
In ancient China, all non-Chinese, and even the Chinese living on the southwest frontier,
were called hu or barbarian. Bodhidharma was called as the western barbarian, the first
patriarch to come to China from India. Pictures of Bodhidharma are well known, and not only
does he always have a beard but a very thick beard indeed.1496 The protagonists in the old
myths, Girard argues, is the entire community transformed into a violent mob. They believe that
an isolated individual threatens them, a person who is often a foreigner, and they spontaneously
massacre the visitor. This type of violence is found in classical Greece, in the sinister cult of
Dionysos.1497
The Chinese, who looked down on foreigners at the time, called Bodhidharma a barbarian
monk because he talked in a way no one understood. When the children looked up at the
bearded Bodhidharma, they ran away in terror. Adults feared that he was a kidnapper and so
told their children to stay away from him.1498 For Girard, the victim appears to be more foreign
than native; as in many myths, the victim is a visitor that has come from an unknown world.
Even when the victim does not appear in the guise of a stranger, it will be seen as coming or
returning from the outside, especially as returning to the outside at the moment when the
community expels it. The fact that founding victims are chosen from outside the community
suggest that the interpretation that makes the victim exterior to the community while
nonetheless placing the victim at the centre and origin of the community must have been

1494

Charlotte Furth, Judith T. Zeitlin, Ping-chen Hsiung, Thinking with Cases: Specialist Knolwedge in Chinese
Cultural history (Hawaii: University of Hawaii Press, 2007), 227.
1495
Girard, The Scapegoat, 27, 28, 32.
1496
Kun Yamada, The Gateless Gate: the Classic Book of Zen Koans (Boston: Wisdom Publications, 2004), 28.
1497
Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 63-4.
1498
Heng-Yin shr, Dharma Realm Buddhist Association Member, Buddhist Text Translation Society, Venerable
Hsuan Hua, Xuan Hua lao he shang shi ji zhou nian ji Wan fo sheng cheng cheng li zhou nian, Dharma Realm
Buddhist Association, 1999, 20.

296

prevalent throughout the course of human history, including the most rudimentary stages of
symbolizing the victim.1499
Some historical figure who had been a Buddha-monk, as Dumoulin puts it, was elevated to
mythical proportions and called the founder (eine mythisch groe Grndergestalt). Hence a
founder was invented. The legends depict the founder of the Zen school as a powerful
personality. People in China, Korea, and Japan have commemorated him and placed him among
their heroes. The legless Daruma doll (one version has it that Bodhidharmas legs withered
away during his nine-year meditation) is a popular toy in East Asia. Anyone who looks at his
portrait is captivated by the larger, piercing eyes (groen, scharfen Augen) of the patriarch. In
the Zen school, the question of why Bodhidharma came from the West (that is, made the
journey from India to China) is regarded as the question of the very nature of Zen enlightenment.
This question is a favorite koan and has evoked innumerable responses.

1500

Later Chinese called Bodhidharma as the blue-eyed barbarian. 1501 In iconography,

Bodhidharma is usually shown with a red robe pulled up to cover his head and large
grotesque eyes(because he has no eyelids). He has blue eyes, a red beard. He is also referred
to as the pierced-eared traveler. Bodhidharma is called the barbarian monk, the blue-eyed
barbarian.1502
This strange Bodhidharmas eyes could be explained by the Girardian insights into the evil
eye as the mythic accusation par excellence. The evil eye is a banal cultural trait: it is found
in numerous communities that until recently were habitually called backward. The strange
power possesed by Oedipus in bringing the plaque to the Thebans is clearly nothing but a
traditional variant of the evil eye. In The Bacchae the supposed mala curiositas of Pentheus,
that is, his perverse desire to spy on the bacchae, is what provokes their rage. Before looking for
the psychoanalytic meaning of Pentheuss supposed voyeurism, we, Girard claims, would do
better to place the phenomenon back into its true collective and sociological context. The
terror of the evil eye is present in all societies in which a propensity for collective violence
continues to ferment, and is manifest as an apparently rational fear of the indiscreet observer, of
the prying or penetrating gaze. In times of war this becomes the espionite, a kind of mass
phobia of spies. Girard argues that in the southern United States there is a connection between
the perpetuation of lynching and the obsession with the Peeping Tom that, until recent years,
remained quite striking for any visitor. These days the accusation of the evil eye can take

1499

Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 78.

Dumoulin, Der Erleuchtungsweg des Zen im Buddhismus, 44-6.
1501
John Daido Loori, The Heart of Being: Moral and Ethical Teachings of Zen Buddhism (Boston: Tuttle Publishing,
1996), 163.
1502
Victor Sgen Hori, Zen Sand. The Book of Capping Phrases for Kan Practice (Hawaii: University of Hawaii
Press, 2003), 642.
1500

297

subtle forms, but it will always tempt any human group in the grip of intolerable tensions and
seemingly insurmountable conflicts.1503
The Roman hero Horatius Cocles is not really one-eyed, but when he frowns and his eyes
narrow, he seems to be, and as a result, he can sometimes defeat his enemies just by looking at
them. His name signifies cyclops. The many blind and one-eyed mythical heroes accused of
having the evil eye remind us, inevitably, of the veils in the Ojibway myth. All six beings are
supposed endowed with the same excessively strong glance, which kills at first sight.1504
Bodhidharma is always depicted as having huge, bulbous, terrifying eyes.1505 Artistic
representations of Bodhidharma often depict him with bulging, lidless eyes. In an article that he
wrote for The Eastern Buddhist, Rudolf Otto saw in the (sacralized) paintings of Bodhidharma a
reflection of the Numinous1506 In an attempt to make the mystery of violence and the sacred,
of the sovereign victim and the sacrificial king, acceptable, Girard says, Otto proposes his
famous concept of the numinous.1507
The violent sacredness and numinous of Bodhidharma should be interpreted in the light of
the founding paradox of surrogate victim mechanism. The collective violence constitutes the
true mainspring of mythological creation. If the collective transfer is really effective, the victim
will never appear as an explicit scapegoat, as an innocent destroyed by the blind passion of the
crowd. This victim will pass for a real criminal, for the one guilty exception in a community
now emptied of its violence. Oedipus is a scapegoat in the fullest sense because he is never
designated as such, Girard stresses.1508
The Japansese representation of Bodhidharma as Daruma shows that he acquired the
symbolic attributes of the Daoist immortal, eventually becoming, in the auspicious form of the
one-eyed Daruma doll, an Asian approximation of Humpty-Dumpty.1509 A common practice
of the influence on karmic fate is seen in the painting pupils on a figure of the Buddhist monk
Zen Daruma (Bodhidharma, 'founder' of Zen Buddhism).1510 The Daruma dolls are a type of
talisman dolls. The Daruma dolls, though typically red and depicting a bearded man
(Daruma), is regarded more as a talisman of good luck to the Japanese.1511
According to Faure, not unlike the onry, Chan and Zen monks were sometimes deified in
order to channel their potentially harmful energy. If, as the legend claims, the scandal
provoked by Bodhidharma (i.e. his rejection of traditional Buddhist practices) resulted in his
1503

Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 116-7.

Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly(ed), Violent Origins. Walter Burkert, Ren Girard, and Jonathan Z. Smith on Ritual
Killing and Cultural Formation (Standford: Stanford University Press, 1987), 104.
1505
Diane Morgan, Essential Buddhism: A Comprehensive Guide to Belief and Practice, ABC-CLIO, 2010, 187.
1506
Rudolf Otto, Professor Rudolf Otto on Zen Buddhism, in The Eastern Buddhist 3 (1924), 117-125.
1507
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 67.
1508
Girard, "To Double Business Bound": Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology, 146.
1509
Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy. A Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism, 117.
1510
Pye and Triplett, Streben nach Glck. Schicksalsdeutung und Lebensgestaltung in japanischen Religionen, 12.
1511
Bernard Faure, Der Buddhismus, 122.
1504

298

untimely death, one may come to see in a different light his later deification as an avatar of
Guanyin as a way of placating his angry spirit. Then, Faure argues: It may not be necessary,
however, to invoke Girardian scapegoats.1512 But it seems to me that there are good reasons to
invoke Girardian surrogate victim. Like the culture heroes of countless foundation myths,
Bodhidharma as founding victim could be thought of as being accused of undifferentiating
crimes (transgressive scandal provoked by Bodhidharma, i.e. his rejection of traditional
Buddhist practices.)

7.4. Meditation as a Form of Trance

In his article Das numinose Erlebnis im Zazen that are included in his book Das Gefhl des
berweltlichen Sensus Numinis (1931), Otto speaks of numinous experience in Zazen and of
irrationality of the numinous. We haver read this irrational numinous dimension in the light of
scapegoat mechanism. For Faure, sitting meditation (zazen) can be seen as a ritual of
identification a ritual leading to a type of trance induced by specific words or sounds.
Scholars have tended to ignore the musical performative aspects of Chan meditation
(bells, wooden sticks, songs, psalmodic recitation of kans). The emphasis on no-thought was
an attempt to elude the psychological content of meditation. The alternative was to focus on the
bodily posture itself. It is in Soto that the formalization of zazen was carried to its extreme.
The increasingly formal approach to Zen points to the importance of considering Chan/Zen as
gestuelle (what the Japaense call a kata) rather than a doctrine, a formalization of the bodily
postures, the four diginified attitudes.1513
Some aspects of Chan meditation, according to Faure, are reminischent of what Gilbert
Rouget calls initiatic trance of depossession depossession being defined as an altered
state of consciousness, transitory and obeying a cultural model. Such depossession is a
preliminary step to possession, that is, the invasion of the field of consciousness by the other.
In Tibetan meditations, practitioners are warned that they will be frightened by the realization,
or rather the intrusion, of their true mind that will appear as the other, as a dazzling, awesome
light.1514
The emphasis on emptiness in Mahyna might preclude the understanding of meditation
as a form of trance or possession. Despite linguistic traps and trappings, however, and the wide
experiential range of both meditation and trance, the experience, Faure argues, may overlap on
various points. Sitting Chan (zazen) can also be seen as a ritual reenactment of the Buddhas
1512

Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy. A Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism, 281-2.

Ibid., 295.
1514
Evans-Wentz, W. Y., ed., The Tibetan Book of the Great Liberation (London: Oxford University Press, 1954),
106-31. See Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy. A Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism, 296.
1513

299

awakening, or even, as in esoteric Buddhism, as a ritual identification with the cosmic Buddha.
Kans also played a significantly part in this ritual process. As Tambiah, in his study on the
performative aspects of ritual, remakred about them: Whether literally meaningful or not, the
prime value of these repeated formulae as support of contemplation or transporters into a
trance state do so, not by a direct assault on the actors senses and inflicting an immense psychic
toll on him or her, but by a more indirect conventional illocutionary employment of them as
instruments of passage and as triggering mechanisms.1515
For Faure, one might reinterpret in this light the notion of sokushin zebutsu (This very
mind is the Buddha) as pointing to a trance experience that may even bear some analogy to
the sokushin jbutsu (Becoming a Buddha in this very body) ritual in Japanese esoterism and Chan awakening as ritual affiliation with patriarchal lineage. Like its hyperboles selfmummification or immolation by fire samdhi transforms the (world-renouncing)
practitioners into a lamp, and this may be one of the meanings of the transmission of the lamp
metaphor.1516
This triggering mechanisms can be considered as surrogate victim mechanism. Buddhist
meditation as a form of trance or possession could be understood also in the light of mimetic
theory. For Girard, the comparative study of ritual and non-ritual trances and other religious
phenomena suggests that the accelerated reciprocity of mimetic reactions within the human
group can alter not only the relations among the participants, which become interdividual, rather
than interindividual that is, which progress beyond the point at which ego and other can still
be meaningfully distinguished but also perception as a whole, causing mixing and interference
that determine the composite nature of ritual masks as well as the monstrosity of mythological
creatures. The so-called cults of possession attempt to reproduce the mimetic trance and its
conclusion in victimage because they view this, justifiably it seems, as a fundamental religious
experience. Hallucination and perceptual scrambling, according to Girard, can only favour the
transiton from acquistive and then conflictual mimesis to the reconciliatory mimesis centered
around a single antagonist (the scapegoat). The victim polarizes and arrests the hallucinatory
phenomena. This is why the primitive deity is quintessentially monstrous.1517 This mimetic
process is interiorized in the cosmicized yogic world-renouncers body.
As Hardy1518 argues, in this way world-renouncer could internalize the violence, make
use of it as the fire that burns up accumulated karma. A strict control of the senses, preventing
the indiscriminate absorption of sense data is common to all three branches. This is one aspect
of the world-renouncers religion where some empirical research has actually been carried out,
1515

Stanley J. Tambiah, A Performative Approach to Ritual, in Proceeding of the British Academy, Vol. 65 (New
York : Oxford University Press, 1981), 141 (cited in Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy. A Cultural Critique of
Chan/Zen Buddhism, 296).
1516
Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy. A Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism, 296-7.
1517
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 35.
1518
Hardy, The Religious Culture of India. Power, Love and Wisdom, 177.

300

normally under the label of sensory deprivation. When placed in an artificially induced
situation of this kind, after a few minutes the subject of the experiment begins to suffer intense
hallucinations and panic. These are not unknown to our Indian meditators and may even be
personified as, for example, the figure of Mra. The pan-Indian tradition, according to
Gombrich/Obeyesekere, 1519 suffices to show that in fact Buddhist path to absorption does very
easily lead the meditator to a trance state. Discussions with contemporary lay Buddhists who
are serious meditators show us that they do tend to experience hallucinations (of any of the
senses) and other sensations on can roughly label as characteristic of trance.
The various rituals attempt to reproduce change in the state of awareness of those taking part,
so that the end result will be violent unanimity. The murder of the victim calms everything
down; it unknots the relationships of doubles, brings back full consciousness and lucidity, and
so founds, or refounds, culture. By his death, the victim establishes difference. Victim delivers
the men who have killed him from the psychotic structure, by this act, restructures their
consciousness. The cults of possession, for Girard, bring about significant modifications in the
state of consciousness. These states of consciousness are brought about by the mimetic
mechanisms. On the one hand, the subject is prepared for possession by monotonous dances and
incessantly repeated sound rhythms. That is obviously reminiscent of how a hypnotic trance is
induced. The repetition of the same, on a musical and gestural level, is a means of modifying
the state of consciousness.1520
The Buddhist, like other Indian traditions, holds that a meditation teacher must exercise
constant supervision because to embark on this uncharted sea by oneself is dangerous and
may lead to mental derangement. There has traditionally been little institutional support for
lay meditation. There are the extraordinary prevalence in contemporary Sri Lanka of intest in
and even attainment of altered states of consciousness: possession, trance, higher states
reached by meditation.1521
Under the heading monstrous double Girard groups all the hallucinatory phenomena
provoked at the height of the crisis by unrecognized reciprocity. The monstrous double is also to
be found wherever we encounter an I and an Other caught up in a constant interchange of
differences. Possession, for Girard, reenacts the hysterical trance and the crazy mixture of
differences that immediately precedes the collective expulsion. Ritual possession seems
inseparable from the sacrificial rites that serve as its culmination. Such is the case with the
Dinka, in those occasional instances in which possession precedes the immolation of the vicitim.
As the rites disintegrate some of the elements that formed them tend to disappear. Others
assume new identities, divorced from their past context. Possessions, like many other aspects of
primordial experience, can become the chief object of religious preoccupation. In such cases
1519
1520
1521

Gombrich and Obeyesekere, Buddhism Transformed. Religious Change in Sri Lanka, 27.
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 317-8.
Gombrich and Obeyesekere, Buddhism Transformed. Religious Change in Sri Lanka, 451-9.

301

possession cults arise. The group sessions of the cult find their climax in an act of sacrificial
slaughter. At a larger stage of the cult the sacrifice disappears from the rites. The shamans,
according to Girard, then try to utilize possession for magico-medical purposes. They become
specialists in the practice of possession.1522
Buddhist Dionysian and festive specialists of the sacred (sacred forest world-renouncer)
seem to interiorize, represent and specialize this mimetic crisis in his yogic-meditative initiation.
The forest world-renouncer par exellence Buddha kyamuni is muni (kya-Muni). Muni is
related to the Greek in terms of language and meaning.1523 The Buddha possesses the title
Skya-muni and is referred to throughout the Nikyas as muni and mah-muni.1524 Yogicmeditative states of forest world-renouncing muni are related to the Dionysian mania in some
sense. The munis are unmadit maunyena. The term unmadita, frequently used in later literature
with reference to ascetic behavior, can refer to madness, intoxication, frenzy, or trance. The
munis are thus intoxicated, frenzied, in a trance, or out of their mind as a result of or by the
power of their munihood. The munis are said to roam wild areas, to tread the path of beasts.
They drink from the same cup as Rudra, a god associated with asceticism and the wilderness.1525
The Buddhist muni, having left his house, going homless and not making acquaitance in a
village, should be free from desire, not desiring [anything in the future] and should not enter
into disputes. 1526 There is a suggestion here that the condition of being in solitude is
synonymous with being free from desire at the same time.1527 Yogic samdhi means in fact a
trance state of diluted consciousness (Trancezustand des abgedmpften Bewutseins) and a
death-like trance state (todeshnlichen Trancezustand).1528 .

7.5. War of Relics

According to the tradition, the death of the Buddha is likened with the sacrifice of the
primeval man, Purusha.1529 The death of world-renouncer was understood as a reconstructed
sacrificial death of purusha (nachvollzogene Opfertod des purusha ).

1530

In the g Veda, the

Purua hymn (10.90) tells of the sacrificial dismemberment of the primeval person, and the
1522

Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 164-6.

Hauer, Der Yoga. Ein indischer Weg zum Selbst, 31.
1524
Martin G. Wiltshire. Ascetic Figures before and in Early Buddhism. The Emergence of Gautama as the Buddha
(Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1990), 24.
1525
Patrick Olivelle, The rama System. The History and Hermeneutics of a Religious Institution (New
York/Oxford: Oxford. Oxford University Press, 1993), 13.
1526
Suttanipta. 844.
1527
Shiraishi, Asceticism in Buddhism and Brahmanism. A Comparative Study, 164.
1528
Hauer, Der Yoga. Ein indischer Weg zum Selbst, 271, 310.
1529
Faure, Der Buddhismus, 102-3.
1530
Krick, Nrya abali und Opfertod, 73, n. 16.
1523

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arising of the physical and social worlds from different parts of the body. According to Collins,
it is this use of the sacrificial person, Prajpati, as a term for the subjective self within which
reflects most clearly the interiorisation of the sacrifice in renunciatory thought. The
internalisation of the aspect of sacrifice as self-denial added to the devaluation of all which is
not self, produces both the ascetic practice of self-mortification, and the theoretical structure
(concretised in Skhya thought).1531
For Girard, Purua is himself the agglutinated matter of all things, and the sacrificial
creation consists in dismembering him, pulling him into pieces, into strips. Looking at Purusha,
Girard thinks of the Dionysian sacrifice, of the terrible disparagmos (the collective ritual
dismemberment of the Dionysiac rites), the blind stampede of a hysterical mob against a victim,
attacking with blows, with kicks, biting, and scratching, literally ripping him apart, tearing him
to shreds. Only later are the assailants glorified with the title sacrificers.

According to

Girard, the solemn tone and majestic serenity of the Purua hymn (10.90) contradict the
hysterical fury of the Dionysian mania. Far from frenetic and improvised, the sacrifice of
Purusha is presented as an action long and carefully premeditated, assured of its justice and
legitimacy.1532
The word dismember in the last strophe of Purua hymn brings to Girards mind the
Dionysian, and the final result of a collective assault on the victim. Through the attentive
examination of the tendency to minimize and even suppress violence, Girard attempts to
discover the violent traces of sacrificial dismemberment of Purusha. The sacrifice of Purusha
might be, so Girard says, the highly modified and muted version of a scene that, at its origin,
more closely resembled the lynching of Pentheus by the Bacchantes than the hymn of the Rig
Veda. The bits and pieces torn from Purusha become the diverse components of the social order.
All the strips of Purusha, all the scraps of his flesh, are transformed into beings perfectly
formed and constituted.1533
For Hubert and Mauss, it is through Purushas suicide, by the abandonment of himself, by
the renunciation of his body, later a model for the Buddhist renunciation, that the god
brought about the existence of things.

1534

The creation of the world by means of the

cosmogonic sacrifice of Purua (the primeval person) in g Veda X, 90, and the progenerative
actions of Prajapti seem to have been borrowed from the Brhmanical tradition by Buddhists
and then apparently attributed to Avalokitevara. All of social, natural, and supernatural creation
is said to have been produced out of the various parts of Avalokitevaras body, an action fully
comparable to the gods sacrifice of Purua in g Veda X, 90, from which all creation was said
to begin. Avalokitevara) is referred to as a bodhisattva mahsattva (great being) because he
1531

Collins, Selfless Persons: Imagery and Thought in Theravada Buddhism, 81.

Girard, Le sacrifice, 33-4.
1533
Ibid., 34-5.
1534
Henri Hubert and Marcel Mauss, Sacrifice: Its Nature and Function, translated by W.D. Halls (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1964), 93.
1532

303

is a guide to other aspiring Bodhisattvas, is possessed of great compassion (mahkaru) and

loving-kindness (mahmaitr), is endowed with the 32 marks of the cosmic person
(mahpurua), preaches the truth of the dharma, and selflessly takes on the suffering of all,
unconditionally.1535
The mythology of Avalokitevara is essentially a phantasmagoric illustration of these very
same religious qualities and principles, particularly his actions that demonstrate the alturism of
selflessness/emptiness. Various elements of Avalokitevaras career and divine functions
were further derived from Vedic and Brhmanical sources.1536 As iva dwells on top of Mount
Kailsa, Avalokitevara dwells on his own mountaintop. Both are at once regarded as great
ascetics yet at the same time are princely figures. The lotus and the trident are symbols that both
frequently carry. The jamakua, the piled and matted hair of an ascetic usually formed into the
shape of a royal crown, is found on top of the heads of almost every early medieval sculptural
icon representing the two figures. Forms and attributes of Avalokitevara may have been
inspired by the cult of iva, but there remains a distinctive buddhistic ethos to his cult and
personality. Of more religiophilosophical significance are the similarities between the two
figures in the development of tantric religious thought that surfaced spectacularly within both
Mahyna Buddhist and Hindu contexts in the seventh and eighth centuries. 1537
Paul Mus1538 has examined the relationship between human sacrifice, Vedic fire-altar and
Buddhist cult of stpa: The Vedic fire-altar, thanks to a magical transposition, contains within
itself the person of the sacrificer, figured by his measurement. The sacrificer, in the course of
the ritual, dies and vows himself to Prajapati who absorbs him. The ancient ritual, which only
fell into disuse at a date which is relatively fairly recent, necessitated the putting to death of a
human victim. The skull was bricked into the infrastructure and the body thrown into the water
which was used for making the bricks. It impregnated these with magic power; it animated them
with supernatural life and energy. Just as, later on, the personal relics of the Buddha introduced
life (jivita) into the stpa, architectural body of the Buddha, similarly the life of the man
(purusa) sacrificied was to animate the altar, tiny body of Prajapati, with a little life, smallscale image of the immense life of the god, as the altar copied his cosmic body. We are, so Mus
argues, then in the presence of a modality of sacrifice where, for the profit of the sacrificer, a
victim, ultimately identified with the god, is put to death and dispersed symbolically over all
the expanse of a consecrated area, occupied by a ritual edifice. Buddhist relics must have been

1535

Marie-Therese de Mallman, Introduction lEtude DAvalokitevara. Paris: Annales du Musee Guimet; Tome
Cinquante-septieme, 1948, 99.
1536
Ibid., 100-15.
1537
Holt, Buddha in the Crown. Avalokitevara in the Buddhist Traditions of Sri Lanka, 41-2.
1538
Paul Mus, Barabudur. Sketch of a History of Buddhism Based on Archaeological Criticism of the Texts,
translated from the French by Alexander W. Macdonald (New Delhi: Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts
Janpath, 1998), 129.

304

in considerable demand in order to activate the numerous stupas which from the third
1539

century B. C. onward were being built all over India.

Thus the most complete analysis of the Brahmanic sacrificial cult in terms of its
significance for the practice of relic veneration has been put forth by Paul Mus in the
introduction to his study of the monument of Brbudur. The basic force of his argument, for
Trainor, centers on what he sees to be the functional continuity between the Brahmanic
sacrifice centered on the agnicayana and the cultic veneration of the Buddha oriented around
the stpa and its relics. Paul Mus he succeeds in demonstrating a striking continuity between
the broad pattern of beliefs and practices that lie behind the Brahmanic sacrifice and those that
provide the context for the practice of relic veneration. Mus sees a fundamental continuity in
religious function between the Vedic fire altar, which served as the Brahmanic communitys
means of ritual access to the Prajpati, and the Buddhist stpa, which provided the means for
Buddhists to approach the Buddha who had utterly passed away.1540 Paul Mus visualises a close
connection between the fire altar and Buddist stupa (caitya) which has been regarded in the
Buddhist tradition as the body of Buddha.
The Vedic ritual of the fire-altar repeats the self-sacrifice of the original scapegoat
(sacrificial dismemberment of Purusha through gods and self-sacrificie of Prajapati). 1541
Putting to death of a human victim was repetition of Prajapatis self-sacrifice. 1542 Human
sacrifice seems to have played a role in the construction of fire-altar.The bodies of the five
(beheaded) sacrificial animals in a Vedic fire-ritual were put into the water along with the clay
that will be used for making the bricks of the fire-altar to make them firm. This fire-altar and its
associated ritual were seen to be recreations of the (self-) sacrifice of the original cosmic man
(Purusa, in RV 10.90; Prajapati, in many sacrificial contexts) from whose body the universe,
both phenomenal and indivisible, came to being. Through the ritual reenactment of this
cosmogonic event, the sacrificer maintained the order of the universe and himself became,
according to the symbolic understanding of this tradition, homologized with the primal
sacrificied sacrificer, who is Purusa. The body of the cosmos is ritually constructed in
architectonic fashion through the aggregation of some 10, 800 bricks. In constructing the firealtar, the dispersed body of Prajapati is reconstructed, while the identify of the person of the
sacrificer with that of Prajapati is established.1543
Buddhism began as, and often remains, an Indian religion in its form and content.
Therefore, if one is to understand its doctrinal, mythic, institutional, and other facets, as they

1539
1540

Snellgrove, Indo-Tibetan Buddhism. Indian Buddhists and Their Tibetan Successors, 35.
Trainor, Relics, Ritual and Representation in Buddhism. Rematerializing the Sri Lankan Theravda Tradition, 38,

102.

1541

Mircea Eliade, Geschichte der religisen Ideen, Band I: Von der Steinzeit bis zu den Mysterien von Eleusis
(Freiburg-Basel-Wien: Herder, 1978), 194.
1542
Ibid., 204.
1543
White, Dakkhia and Agnicayana: An Extended Application of Paul Muss Typology, 190-2.

305

constitute interrelated modalities of an organic whole, Buddhisms Indian, as White claims,

context must be taken into account. For Paul Mus, the key Indian symbol system from which
early Buddhism(and much of Hinduism) took its inspiration was that manifested in the
Brahmanic fire altar and sacrifice. This altar and its associated ritual were seen to be recreation
of the (self-) sacrifice of the original cosmic man (Purua, in RV 10.90; Praj
pati, in many
sacrificial contexts) from whose body the universe, both phenomenal and invisible, came into
being. Through the ritual reenactment of this cosmogonic event, the sacrificer maintained the
order of the universe and himself became, accoriding to the symbolic understanding of this
tradition, homologized with the primal sacrificed sacrificer, who is Purua. Just as the
Buddhism of Gautama grew out of that Indian matrix that valorized the symbolism of the fire
sacrifice, so other concepts and practices would continue to well up from the same matrix to
constantly enrich (later Buddhist understanding of) the orginal teachings. 1544
For the Buddha, the brahmanical cult fire and the ritualistic atman concept are intimatley
tied with each other.1545 Just as the Buddhism of Gautama grew out of that Indian matrix that
valorized the symbolism of the fire sacrifice, so other concepts and practices would continue to
well up from the same matrix.1546In the same way that the fire altar is composed of an aggregate
of bricks, so the individual is composed of an aggregate of acts.1547 Just as the fire altar is an
aggregate of 10,800 bricks and nothing more (no transcedent whole), so the individual is an
aggregate of acts (karma) and nothing more (there is no atman).1548
Girard has illucidated the relationship between pieces of the sacrificial victim and language
all over the world. The phenomenon of the sparagmos is extremely important as it is tied to
representation. In many socieites (Greece, Australia) the naming of geographical entities, inside
the community, is tied to pieces of the victim. It is present as well in India, at the most archaic
level. The most famous myth of all Indian literature, is the myth of Purusa, the primordial man,
who was killed by a multitude of sacrificers, and from his body the three main castes are born.
For Girard, the origin of language is related to scapegoating. This substitution of an immolated
victim for the first is the beginning of representation and language, but also the beginning of
sacrifice and ritual.1549
After his death, the fragmented body of the Buddha in the form of relics (arra),
remained an object of desire and fetishism, and almost caused a war of the relics.1550 Also
Oedipus, a surrogate victim, is still a dangerous, even a terrifying figure, but he has become
very precious to the community. Colonus and Thebes begin to squabble over the future
1544
1545
1546
1547

White, Dakkhia and Agnicayana: An Extended Application of Paul Muss Typology, 190, 199.
Heesterman, The Broken World of Sacrifice. An Essay in Ancient Indian Ritual, 127.
White, Dakkhia and Agnicayana: An Extended Application of Paul Muss Typology, 199.
Mus, Barabudur - Esquisse D'Une Histoire Du Bouddhisme Fondee Sur la Critique Archeologique Des Textes,

149.

1548
1549
1550

Ibid., 181.
Markus Mller, Interview with Ren Girard, Anthropoetics II, no. 1 (June 1996) consulted November 2008.
Faure, The Red Thread. Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality, 19-20.

306

possession of the patricides corpse, which is already looked upon as a valuable relic.1551
Immediately after his death, the relics of the Buddha became the precious talismans.1552
The account of the great riots among the French people during the wars of religion teem
with examples similar to the Buddhist war of relics, Oedipuss corpse as a valualbe relic and
Plutaarchs text. The rioters even fight over the last remains of their victim, which they
consider precious relics and which could later be sold for the most exorbitant prices. There are
endless examples which suggest a close relationship between collective violence and a process
in which a victim becomes sacred without necessarily already being powerful and renowned.
The metamorphosis of remains into relics has also been documented in the case of racial
lynchings in modern times.1553
There was the communal or public value placed on relics of world-renouncer. The
Buddhist old tradition concerning what has come to be called the War of the Relics is related
to this theme of collective value of sacralized relics of world-renouncer. Already in the oldest
surviving Buddhist art at Sanci, Bharhut, Amaravati, and in Gandhara we have illustrations
of this episode. After the cremation of the Buddha, the Mallas of Kusinara surrounded the
bones of the Exalted One in their council hall with a lattice work of spears, and with a rampart
of bows. Seven other groups representing distinct and apparently competing political entities
also came, however, armed for war to claim a share of the relics. Conflict potential or actual
is a consistent theme in literary accounts of the deposition of the Buddhist dead. The War of
the Relics, never actually launched, is an established element of the accounts of the death of the
Buddha. Anandas death and the deposition of his remains also takes place in a context marked
by the threat of war between competing claimants for his remains.1554
Under the title Buddha Relics as Object of Contention: Wish-Fulfilling Jewel Worship and
Relic Theft, Ruppert1555 had dealt with the Buddhist sacralization of the relics. Japanese
Buddhists inherited narratives depicting competitions to acquire relics for worship. The story
of the rivalries between humans and other beings for possession of the relics of the Buddha
following his pari-nirvna provide a model for the proper cycle of adoration, conflict, and
resolution in their distribution. A variation of this sequence was rehearsed, for example, in the
story of how the disciple nanda prevented war (of relics) through his ritual selfimmolation and the subsequent distribution of his remains to two kings vying for his relics.
1556

Relics of Buddhas, arhats and other saints have always been important in Buddhism. These

relics were not simply reminders of the dead. As Gregory Schopen has demonstrated, they were

1551

Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 85.

Bareau, Der indische Buddhismus, 66.
1553
Girard, The Scapegoat, 90.
1554
Schopen, Bones, Stones, and Buddhist Monks: Collected Papers on the Archaeology, Epigraphy, and Texts of
Monastic Buddhism in India, 133, 191.
1555
Ruppert, Jewel in the Asches. Buddha Relics and Power in Early Medieval Japan, 142.
1556
Ibid., 142.
1552

307

considered to be living entites legal persons who had property rights, and were functionally
equivalent to living beings, specifically living Buddhas.1557
As mentioned earlier, Buddha relics were jealously guarded as the sacred jewels of
esoteric traditions and became common objects of theft. 1558 From the earliest period,
Buddhists have venerated the relics of the special dead. In his article entitled The Idolization
of Enlightenment: On the Mummification of Chan Masters in Medieval China, Sharf has
analyzed the Buddhist cult of relics and mummies.1559 For the production of such relics in
China by Chinese monks and nuns, auto-cremation and mummification in East Asian Buddhism
were particularly practised. A significant number of eminent Chinese Chan priests were
mummified at death and enshrined in temple precincts as objects of worship. The practice of
preserving the bodies of famous Chan masters- turning their corpses into icons of flesh
continues down to the present day. The fact that the remains of deceased Chan masters were
quite litrally idolized by their disciples may come as a surprise to some students of Chan.
Given the belief, still widespread in the West, that Chan is precisely that school of Buddhism
that sought to purge Buddhism of empty ritual and vulgar superstition, and given the popular
conception of the Chan master as incarnate Buddha and iconolcastic sage destined for final
nirvna at death, the mummification and worship of the masters corpse seems curious indeed.
The bodies of Buddhist masters who resisted decay after death were accordingly worshiped as
reservoirs of meritorious karma and spiritual power. The possession of a flesh icon could
transform an out-of-the-way temple into a thriving pilgrimage center, attracting Buddhist
faithful from all quarters of China.1560
Therefore, there are practical economic and institutional reasons for attempting to preserve
and display the remains of an eminent Chan abbot. The abbot as awakened Buddha constituted
a pure field of meirt, and as such was expected to attract the financial support from
government and lay sources necessary for the maintenance of a large monastic establishment.
The physical body of the abbot-qua-buddha constituted a pure reservoir of merit, and the
temple stood to gain in wealth and prestige from preserving the abbots remains. Buddhist
charismatic figures (radical forest world-renouncer), by virtue of their practice of austerites
(dhtaguna) and mastery of meditative trance (dhyna), were treated as reservoirs of spiritual
power. In Buddhist terms they were particularly potent fields of merit. The abbot of a Chan
monastery is by definition the living descendant and representative of a sacred lineage of
enlightened patriarchs who trace their ancestry back to the Buddha. The abbots primary
religious duty consists in ritually enacting the role of Buddha. Indeed, according to Chan
1557

Gregory Schopen, Burial Ad Sanctos and the Physical Presence of the Buddha in Early Indian Buddhism: A
Study in the Archeology of Religions, Religion 17 (1987), 204, 209-10.
1558
Ruppert, Jewel in the Asches. Buddha Relics and Power in Early Medieval Japan, 10.
1559
Robert H. Sharf, The Idolization of Enlightenment: On the Mummification of Chan Masters in Medieval
China, in History of Religions 31/1 (1992), 3.
1560
Ibid., 2, 9.

308

tradition the central Buddha icon in the Buddha Hall- the focal point of Chinese Buddhist
monastic ritual- came to be replaced in Chan monasteries by the living person of the abbot,
thereby obviating the need for a Buddha Hall altogether. The Chan abbot enacted the part of
living Buddha icon on a regular basis in an elaborately choreographed ritual called shangtang, or ascending the hall.

1561

When (world-renouncing) arhants die, they are typically cremated; Fa-hsien describes the
cremation of a particular arhant in Sri Lanka: After his death, the King immediately examined
the Sacred Books, with a view to perform the funeral obsequies according to the rules for such
as are Rahats[arhants].When all was over, they diligently searched for the bones and collected
them together, in order to raise a tower[stpa] over them. From this passage, it appers that the
cremation of arhants was to be carried out according to certain specifications, that these might
be found in written texts, that the king had a special role, and that the assembled devotees
participated in the cremation mentally (their solemn thoughts) and physically(by throwing
certain garments and possession into the flames).1562
As we saw earlier, the sacralized relics of the Buddha was considered as a precious talisman.
For Girard, the cadaver of the reconcilatory victim was considered as talisman, as the bearer
of life and fertility. Culture always develops as a tomb. The tomb is, so Girard says, nothing but
the first human monument to be raised over the surrogate victim, the first most elemental and
fundamental matrix of meaning. There is no culture without a tomb and no tomb without a
culture; in the end the tomb is the first and only cultural symbol. The above-ground tomb does
not have to be invented. It is the pile of stones in which the victim of unanimous stoning is
buried. It is the first pyramid. It is the piles of stones in which the victim of unanimous stoning
is buried. It is the first pyramid.1563
Sitting meditation as ritual or mystical identification with the Buddha in nirvana is also
a form of suspended animation or temporary death. According to Faure, this means an
iconization of the practioner, in some respects similar to the iconization of the flesh-body.
The practitioner has metonymically become, like the sarira, the stupa or the icon, a living
grave.1564 These Buddhist radical world-renouncers, by virtue of their practice of austerites
(dhtaguna), mastery of meditative trance (dhyna) and the so-called (world-renouncing)
meditations on impurity (skt. Aubha-bhvan, chin. pu-ching kuan) contemplating the
inherent repulsiveness of the body, were treated as reservoirs of spiritual power. In Buddhist
terms they were particularly potent fields of merit.1565
We have already interpreted the cult of the Buddhist saint (radical world-renouncer) in
terms of the sacralization of the surrogate victim. Societal and cultic recognition of the saints
1561
1562
1563
1564
1565

Ibid., 6, 25.
Ray, Buddhist Saints in India. A Study in Buddhist Values & Orientations, 189.
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 83.
Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy. A Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism, 296.
Sharf, The Idolization of Enlightenment: On the Mummification of Chan Masters in Medieval China, 3, 6.

309

develops among all segments of the Buddhist population and is oriented both to living saints
and , after death, to the stpa (or its functional equivalent, such as saintss images or relics),
which localizes their ongoinng presence.1566 The perfervid value attached to sacralized and
increasingly commoditized relics of the forest world-renouncers and the cult of amulets on the
part of the modern Thai Buddhists 1567 can be also understood in the sense of the sacralization
of the reconcilatory victims relics.
The cremated remains of the Buddha himself were immediately divided into eight
portions. The cults of Buddhist world-renouncer were closely connected to the cults of sacred
places. We may speak not only of relics of geography, but also of a geography of relics.
Miracles in Tibet, and the intersection of categories of signs of saintly death and relics has
been discussed. Pearls are said to emerge miraculously from saintly remains and images that
appear in bodily or other substances connected with cremations. Tibetans have, and have had,
very highly developed cults of relics. Various bodily emissions constitute a significant minority
of the relics: blood, urine, reproductive substances, mucus (handkerchiefs). Many of these relics
carry almost too obvious associations of vitality, reproduction and growth. The theme of an
underlying vitality adhering to the mortal remains of Buddhist world-renouncer finds its
strongest expression in the miraculous multiplication of relics referred to as increasing bone
(phel-gdung).1568
Unlike a immediate sacralization of dismembered or divided relics of world-renouncing
Buddhas, the sacred, Girard argues, plays no part in the death of Jesus. There were three
symbolic days to elapse between Christs death and resurrection. It means that we are dealing
with something entirely different from the sacred. Here life, according to Girard, does not come
directly out of the violence, as in primitive religions. Christ is not born again from his own
ashes like the phoenix. He does not play with life and death like a kind of Dionysus. That,
Girard claims, is what the theme of the empty tomb is designed to show. In this case, death no
longer has anything at all to do with life. The naturalistic character of this death is
underlined.1569

7.6. Self-mummified Buddhas

1566
1567

Ray, Buddhist Saints in India. A Study in Buddhist Values & Orientations, 45.
Taylor, Forest Monks and the Nation-State: An Anthropological and Historical Study in Northeastern Thailland,

180.
1568

Dan Martin, Pearls from Bones: Relics, Chortens, Tertons and the Signs of Saintly Death in Tibet, in Numen
41 (1994), 273-8.
1569
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 231-3.

310

As Colonus and Thebes squabbled over the future possession of the Oedipuss corpse
looked upon as a valuable relic,1570 the sacralized relics of the Buddhist world-renouncer
became the bones of contention.1571 Relics were from the outset bones of contention, as
the legends related to the deaths of the Buddha and his disciple and cousin Ananda show. All the
mummies of Buddhist monks discovered in Japan and belonging to the Shgend tradition are a
ritualistic reenactment of sokushin jobutsu (becoming a Buddha in this very body). A Tendai
monk and trickster Zga (917-1003) did achieve self-mummification at Tonomine. The
politics of mummification, namely the use of mummies and relics as commodities in the
sectarian context 1572 could be explained by the Girardian theory on the sacralization of
surrogate victims relics. According to Faure, it seems that the Chinese interest in flesh-bodies
was primarily a concern of monks and expressed a highly structurec awareness of death. Behind
these monastic concerns, Faure detected intense sectarian stakes. It is not by a mere
coincidence that most of the mummies recorded in the Chan tradition happen to be the
founders of new schools. In all likelihood, the mummies of these patriarchs were used as a
device by their successors (and owners) to attract the devotion of believers. Faure asked to what
extent these attempts at self-mummification in some cases were free decisions of the individual
or reflected the pressure and expectations of the community. Were they, so Faure says, not
ritual suicides, and at times more or less consenting sacrifices,? The question must remain
open. But clearly the self-mummified Chan master became after his death a collective property,
a disputed commodity.1573
Sokushinbutsu () were Buddhist monks or priests who caused their own deaths in a
way that resulted in their mummification. These self-mummified monks was considered as
living Buddhas.

1574

A self-mummifying monk would lock himself in a stone tomb barely

larger than his body, where he would not move from the lotus position. In Buddhism, in
addition to the Buddha, pratyekabuddhas, previous Buddhas, the future Buddha, celestial
Buddhas, and cosmic Buddhas, still another kind of Buddha was recognized by some Buddhists
what we shall call a living Buddha. Living Buddhas are persons in this world who have, in
one way or another, achieved the status of a fully enlightenend and compassionate being. In
some cases these living Buddhas have attained Buddhahood through various, usually Esoteric,
forms of practice.

1575

The Buddhist worship of stpa, relics, and mummies could be understood in terms of the
sacralization of reconcilatory victim. The sacralized power of Chan masters was manifest in and

1570

Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 85.

Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy. A Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism, 160-9.
1572
Ibid., 160.
1573
Ibid., 161.
1574
Kleine, Sterben fr den Buddha, Sterben wie der Buddha. Zu Praxis und Begrndung ritueller Suizide im
ostasiatischen Buddhismus, 12.
1575
Reynolds and Hallisey, The Buddha, 44.
1571

311

through their relics. Buddhist world-renouncers set up a new sacred topography, a new
network of pilgrimage centered on sacred sites such as meditation caves and stpa. The
manipulation of sacred relics triggered what we may call a process of sacralization, which
transformed the mummified patriarch into a saintly intercessor and ultimately into a god with
a wider lay following.1576
World-renouncers ritual suicides and self-mummification could be understood either as free
decisions and consenting sacrifices or reflecting subtle pressure and expectations of the
sacrificial community of worldly householder. The question remain open. For Girard, the most
effective means of surrogate victim mechanism that makes the scapegoat the principle of social
unity, a god who is both harmful and beneficial, is the victims confession, in due and proper
form. Oedipus at the end of his tragedy keeps repeating that he is a horrible impurity, disgusting
to both gods and men: what in Greek is called miasma. He demands his own expulsion with
an enthusiasm that will eventually earn him the communitys respect. It is important to obtain
the victims free consent to his punishment. What is required is their enthusiastic agreement
with the decision to destroy them. The need for a consenting victim characterizes modern
totalitarinism as well as certain religious or para-religious forms of the primitive world. The
victims of human sacrifice are always presented as very much in favour of their own
immolation, completely convinced of its necessity. It, Girard claims, is this persecutors point of
view that modern neo-primitivism fails to criticize.1577
According to Faure, these history of fights over a corpse, is at least as long as that of
Buddhism.1578 The contest for the other relics of the sixth patriarch, and their role in dynastic
legitimation, is reflected in the stories according to which, in 760, the emperor Suzong sent an
envoy to Caoxi aksing that Huinengs robe and bowl to be enshrined in the imperial palace. The
link between various relics or Buddhist regalia and imperial legitimation is well illustrated by
the imperial orders to bring to the court the mummy of Baozhi, a sandalwood image of the
Buddha, the Five Hundred Arhats of Lushan, and Asokas reliquary. Relics of the worldrenouncer were not only a way for a community to attract donations in times of prosperity; they
were also a way for the community to defend itself against spiritual or physical aggression in
times of adversity.1579 I have already explained this link between the sacralized relics of the
Buddhist world-renouncer and imperial legitimation in terms of the founding and differentiating
surrogate victim mechanism. Scapegoats effects is differentiating and mystifying.1580
Hori has dealt with recent discovery of self-mummified Buddhas in the Shugen-d

1576
1577
1578
1579
1580

Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights. An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition, 173.
Girard, Job: The Victim of His People, 112-6.
Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy. A Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism, 161.
Ibid., 165-7.
Girard, Job: The Victim of His People, 97.

312

sect of the Shingon school.

1581

All of them resolved to become mummified Buddhas because

they believed in the doctrine peculiar to the Shingon school of the sokushin-jbutsu (becoming a
Buddha in his very own body).1582 They were stronly influenced by Mantrayana Buddhism as
found in the Tendai and Shingon esotericism and ritualism.1583 A Buddhist world-renouncer had
determined to become a Buddha in his very own body as his body was(sokushin-jbutsu), and
in 1683 he entered into a stone chamber under the ground and died a death while chanting a
prayer to Amitabha Buddha(Amida-butsu). His corpse was exhumed from the chamber
immediately after his death, made to assume a sitting posture with crossed legs like a Buddha,
and dried up with a charcoal fire and incense fumes. After that the corpse was buried again in
the underground chamber for about three years. When it was again recovered, the corpse had
become completely mummified. It was enshrined by the follwers and disciples of Honmy-kai
as an object of worship in a special hall in Honmy-ji called soku-butsu-d (hall dedicated to
the person who became a Buddha in his very own body). Even today he is worshipped as a
Buddha and supplicated by the peasants near a temple for the relief of eye diseases.1584
In China and Japan statues and portraits were believed to be alive, once the rite of
opening the eyes was performed. Many cases have been recorded of statues that sweat, cried,
moved, or walked. The consecration of an icon is a birth. It is the creation of the living dead
in orther words a mummy.1585 The icons are, in the strict sense, the visible bodies of the gods.
Accordingly, so Faure argues, a rationalist or aesthetic interpretation of Chan iconology
would be misleading. Chan/Zen monks were in fact trying to limit the proliferation of sacred
symbols and to reserve for themselves the privilege of the possession of selected symbols or
icons such as saira and mummies. The so-called iconoclasm was therefore a relative one.1586
I have interpreted the transgressive and undifferentiating iconoclasm of Buddhist worldrenouncer the light of the surrogate scapegoat mechanism. For Girard, all cultural institutions
must be interpreted in terms of the transformations sacrifices undergo and the evolution that
specializes them little by little into funerals, marriage, rites of initiation, schools, political power,
etc.1587 In Japan, certain self-mummified saints were worshiped in order to enhance fertility.
In one particular case, the object of devotion was the dried genitals of the Buddhist worldrenouncer.1588
The inability of religious thought to understand correctly the violent mechanism of its
own genesis, Girard argues, gives rise to countless interpretations that can be different from
1581

Ichiro Hori, Self-Mummified Buddhas in Japan. An Aspect of the Shugen-D (Moutain Asceticism) Sect, in
History of Religions (1962), 222- 42.
1582
Ibid., 227.
1583
Ibid., 231.
1584
Ibid., 224.
1585
Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights. An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition, 172-3.
1586
Ibid., 177.
1587
Girard, Le sacrifice, 49.
1588
Faure, The Red Thread. Buddhist Approaches to Sexuality, 29.

313

each other because they are all erroneous. These interpretations are the rituals and myths of all
human societies.1589 Self-mummification was usually achieved by entering the final samdhi,
and it is significant that in the Indian context, samdhi designates metonymically both the
spiritual state of the world-renouncer and the grave in which he is buried alive.1590 All Jains
have an ideal of death while in meditation, as found in the concept of samdhi marana.

1591

For all Digambars lay and religious, male and female all spiritual life is a preparation for a
holy death.1592 Death while in meditation after prolonged fasting is the ideal death.1593 Such
a death is connected with the doctrine of nonharming(ahis).1594
Mummification was also sometimes the outcome of a dramtic death. A Buddhist
world-renouncer Shanxin, one day told his followers: Other offerings are incomparable with
the offering of ones body. Thereafter he cut off his foot with a sharp-edged knife and placed it
on the table. He died subsequently and was followed in death by two of his lay disciples who
had been attending him. Having heard this, the regional commander sent officers with presents
and covered their corpses with gold. We are told that thereafter, prayers offered by the people
brought immediate response. They should be, for Faure, seen against the backdrop of selfimmolation in Chinese Buddhism. These Chan adepts were mummified just after their
suicide.1595

7. 7. Yogic Proecess as a Death Process

Yogic process of the world-renouncing meditation can be understood as a kind of death
process. Faure has analysed the increasing ritualization and collectivization of death in Zen
Buddhism that is related to the Buddhist world-renouncer. This ritualization affects all the
stages (in both senses) of the (world-renouncers) death process. There is a three-act sequence
consisting of the prediction of death, the final words, and the ritual entrance into samdhi.
From the early times, the death of a Chan master was staged as an epoch-making event the
ritual reenactment of the Buddhas parinirva. The first task of a truly enlightened master as
such fully endowed with abjij was to foretell, not only his forthcoming death, but the precise

1589

Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 301.

Parry, Sacrificial Death and the Necrophagous Ascetic 97.
1591
Purushottama Bilimoria, A Report from India: The Jain Ethics of Voluntary Death, Bioethics 6 (1992), 336-8.
1592
Padmanabh S. Jaini, The Jaina Path of Purification (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California
Press, 1979), 232-3.
1593
Colette Caillat, Fasting Unto Death. According to the Jaina Tradition, Acta Orientalia, 38 (1977), 43-66;
Padmanabh S. Jaini, The Jaina Path of Purification (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press,
1979), 1, 226, 227-40.
1594
Stephen R. Munzer, Heroism, Spiritual Development, and Triadic Bonds in Jain and Christian Mendicancy and
Almsgiving in Numen. 48, 47-80, 50-51.
1595
Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy. A Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism, 154.
1590

314

time of his transformation.1596

This collectivity of worldly householder around the ritualized death of the world-renouncer
could be considered in terms of what Girard has referred to as a collective transcendence
produced by the surrogate victim mechanism. Human culture is, so Girard says, predisposed to
the permanent concealment of its origins in collective violence.1597 This ritualization of
(world-renouncers) death affects all the stages of the death process, a three-act sequence
consisting of the prediction of death, the final words, and the ritual entrance into samdhi.1598
From the early times, the death of a Chan master was staged as a ritual reenactment of the
Buddhas parinirva. The first task of a truly enlightened master as such fully endowed with
abjij was to foretell, not only his forthcoming death, but the precise time of his death. An
interesting aspect of this ritualization of the prediction of ones death is a four-verse gatha
known as Great Master [Bodhi]dharmas [Method for] knowing the time of ones
death(Daruma daishi chishigo).1599
Another important element in the ars moriendi of the world-renouncer in Zen Buddhism is
the final death posture. His death became a public event, and he was required to die in a
seated posture in order to show, not only that he was intent on practicing until the end and that
he had become ritually identified with the paradigmatic Buddha (the historical Buddha having
died lying on his bed). The most extreme case is that of the National Teacher Dait (Shh
Mych, 1282-1337), who, according to his hagiographer, had been unable during his entire life
to sit properly in zazen due to an infirm leg. Approaching his last moment, he deliberately broke
his leg in order to achieve the proper zazen posture. Usually seen as an extreme illustration of
perfect freedom in death, the ritual suicide of some Chan masters is reminiscent of Chinese
Buddhist self-immolations and later Japanese self-mummifications (sokushin-butsu). Citing
Girardian components, Faure also has dealt with the Japanese custom of drowning oneself in
a sinking boat in order to reach the pure land of Kannon, the island of Fudarkaku (Sk. Potalaka)
believed to lie off the coast of the Nachi/Kumano area. The collective and sacrificial in a
Girardian sense are, according to Faure, illustrated by the story of the man who resolved to
drown himself and then, having come to his senses when he contacted the cold water, swam
frantically back to the shore. Despite his protestations, he was put aflot again by his followers
and eventually drowned.1600
This custom of drowning Buddhist saint (world-renouncer) in a sinking boat had the
character of carnivals (Volksfestcharakter). 1601 For Faure, these individual suicide were
1596

See Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy. A Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism, chapter 9. The Ritualization
of Death (179-207).
1597
Girard, The Scapegoat, 100.
1598
Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy. A Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism, 184-9.
1599
Ibid., 184-6.
1600
Ibid., 189-90.
1601
Kleine, Sterben fr den Buddha, Sterben wie der Buddha. Zu Praxis und Begrndung ritueller Suizide im
ostasiatischen Buddhismus, 10.

315

collective in the Durkheimian sense and were staged as public events. What had at first
appeared as supremely individual turns out to be the product of socially-constructed emotions
and beliefs.1602 The death of the master (world-renouncer) and more precisely his cremation
became (or perhaps simply remained) an essentailly collective phenomenon reflecting the
concerns and expectations of the whole community.1603
This Buddhist householders worldly and collective desires and concerns around the
meditative death of the (radical) world-renouncer can be explained by the Girardian theory on
principles that govern the transformation of collective violence into the sacred. Girards
scapegoat hypothesis is never directly legible in a text. It describes a structuring process, and
cannot be deduced directly from a single text. There is nothing more difficult than detecting the
structuring mechanism at work in a text.1604 We can detect the concealed mechanism of
reconcilatory victim behind Buddhist world-renunciation. The victim mechanism, for Girard, is
not a literary theme like many others. It is a principle of illusion. As such, it cannot appear at
all in the texts it control. Scapegoat mechanism dominates texts where it remains invisible,
unsuspected, as in the myths. The necessary condition enabling the single victim mechanism to
dominate a text, Girard claims, is that it does not appear as an explicit theme.1605
After the sacrificial death through meditation, Buddhist world-renouncer became a source of
regeneration. For instance, the fact that the flesh-body of Huineng was carried in the countryside
in times of drought bears testimony to its association with rain and fertility.1606 As we have seen,
the world-renouncer Buddha and his community, as a field of merit, offered a mechanism for
the improvement of karma. The concept of the transfer of merit from world-renouncing
Bodhisattvas to worldly believers in his home promoted an economic logic in Buddhist
practice of stpas housing Buddha relics and around the self-mummified Buddhas.1607
This mechanism for the improvement of worldly householders

karma through the self-

sacrifice and sacrificial giving of the world-renoucing Bodhisattvas and Buddhas could be
understood in the light of Girards unrecognized mechanism of the reconcilatory victims.
Mimetic theory is a radicalized Durkheimianism that, far from moving in the direction of the
rite, that is to say, its effacement of violence, seeks instead to return to the violence.1608 For
Girard, Durkheim was the fist firmly to oppose the sceptical obscurantism concerning religion.
Many of the self-sacrificing Buddhist monks had their bones or other remains enshrined in
pagoda alongside the relics of the Buddha or those of other Buddhist saints. It is clear that in
each case the ritualized and self-initiated self-immolation is performed as a remedy for an
1602

Bloch, Maurice, and Johanthan Perry, eds. 1982. Death and the Regeneration of Life. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, p. 3
1603
Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy. A Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism, 190-1.
1604
Girard, Job: The Victim of His People, 31.
1605
Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 146-7.
1606
Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy. A Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism, 206.
1607
Ruppert, Jewel in the Asches. Buddha Relics and Power in Early Medieval Japan, 28.
1608
Girard, Le sacrifice, 34-5.

316

intolerable situation. A selfless and desireless action of the Buddhist world-renouncer in

these cases amounts to a renunciation of personal desires in order to champion social
desires. 1609 This social anthropological mechanism and dialect between desireless worldrenouncer and the worldly householder in their social desires could be described in terms of the
surrogate victim mechanism.
Behind the Passion of Christ, behind a number of biblical dramas, behind many mythical
dramas, and behind primitive rituals, Girard detect the same process of crisis and resolution
founded on the same illusion. This illusion is the misunderstanding about the single victim who
pays the price of the mimetic cycle. Sacrificial dismemberment of the primoridial victim,
Purusha by a mob offering sacrifices produces the caste system. Eliade speaks of creative
murder (meurtre crteur) common to many stories of origin and founding myths throughout
the world. This creative power of this founding murder is often given concrete form in the
value attributed to the fragments of the victim. Each of these is identified as producing a
particular institution, a totemic clan, a territorial subdivision, even the vegetable or animal that
furnishes the community its primary food.1610

7.8. World Conqueror, World Renouncer and the Victim

World-renouncer as a founding victim becomes a world conqueror. A world conqueror and
a world renouncer are two sides of the same coin.1611 There is coalescene of these two
orders (world-renouncer/ wold-conqueror). Thus in Thailand it is generally assumed that the
reigning monarch will become a Buddha in his next, or a very proximate rebirth. And in Tibet
the Dalai Lama was considered a living Buddha-King.1612
According to Tambiah, there is an inner logic to what at first sight is an unlikely
conjunction between the imperial ruler and the ascetic renouncer. The world-renoucning forestmonks were effective groundbreakers, colonizing and civilizing the forest frontiers and
attracting settlements around them. However their better documented role historically is, for
Tambiah, their acting as a vitalizing force and as a countervailing agent to the religious
establishment during periods of religious purification and cultural renaissance. In normal times,
of course, the ruler and his political satellites, the supportive (domesticated) sagha at the
capital, have both symbolized and realized the Buddhist values associated with cakkavatti (king
of kings), bodhisattva (buddha to be), the Dhamma realm in which the religion flourished, and
1609

Orzech, Provoked Suicide and the Victims Behavior, 154.

Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 82-3.
1611
Tambiah, World Conqueror and World Renouncer. A Study of Buddhism and Polity in Thailand against a
historical Background, 43.
1612
King, A Thousand Lives Away. Buddhism in Contemporary Burma, 82.
1610

317

the exemplary center. Yet there were times often enough when things have gone awry at this
centered-maala, wracked, even decimated, by dissension, wars, epidemic, droughts,
rebellions, and other misfortunes. There was all the more a need to recharge and fortify
monarchical legitimacy and creative powers by tapping the purity and charisma of the
untarnished forest ascetics.1613
Buddhist world-renouncers as founding victim also were civilizing heroes for the Buddhist
world order. This Buddhist civilizing heros crime to destroy and to undifferentiate the structure
of difference, to use Girards term, the systems of distinctions that constitute civilization,
have been already interpreted in terms of the reconcilatory victims crime of undifferentiation.
The cray wisdoms and rude awakenings of radical (forest) world-renouncer should be seen
against the backdrop of the surrogate victim mechanism. The future victims are made a part of
the community. They are treated with the kind of double standard accorded the purifying and
sacred scapegoat. They are driven to commit certain transgressions and are then persecuted
and honoured, insulted and esteemed. In Central America, the furture victims in certain rituals
have the privilege or obligation to commit certain transgression, sexual or otherwise, during
the interval of time between their selection and immolation.1614 Mimetic scheme revealing the
genesis and structure of cultural phenomena sheds new light on the inner logic found in an
unlikely conjunction between the imperial ruler and the ascetic world-renouncer and on the
violent paradox of the civilizing, founding, differentiating and world-constructing worldrenouncer.
After the death of the Buddha, his disciple Ananada, instructs the Mallas of Kusinara that
the bodily remains of the Tathagata (Buddha) must be treated like the remains of
a king of
kings, that is, after conducting an elaborate cremation at the four crossroads, they should erect a
dagaba at the spot. Thus the bodily remains of the Buddha are to be accorded the honors of a
cakkavattis mortuary rites. This gives us a lead into the understanding of the use of royal
metaphors for characterizing the Buddhas doctrine, his influence, his relics, as they bear on
this world (lokiya). The dagabas enshrining the relics became bothfields of merit and the
repositories of the Buddhaspower of conquest; his relics (and other particles or objects
representing him) became indissolubly associated with kingship in Buddhist polities, acting as
part of the royal regalia and serving as objects of the royal cult and as symbols of legitimate
kingship.1615 The Kings of Sri Lanka treat the relics of the Buddha like his person and, at the
same time, as a magical copy of their own person, ornamenting them with regalia, and going

1613

Tambiah, The Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets, 77.
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 71.
1615
Tambiah, World Conqueror and World Renouncer. A Study of Buddhism and Polity in Thailand against a
historical Background, 43-4 ; Trainor, Relics, Ritual and Representation in Buddhism. Rematerializing the Sri
Lankan Theravda Tradition.
1614

318

so far as to substitute them for themselves on the throne. They themselves in return play the role
of earthly manifestations of the Buddha.1616
These royal metaphors for characterizing the world-renouncer Buddhas doctrine, his
influence, his relics, can be understood from the viewpoint of the generative illusion of the
scapegoat mechanism. In the ancient and primitive sense of sacred royalty, the scapegoat is
more royal than ever. The monarch plays the role of victim, either symbolic or more or less
real.1617 Radical world-renouncers (forest monks) might have been importantly implicated in
the founding of kingdoms, settlements, and towns. They are seen to work on behalf of the
civilizing mission of state formation and the preservation of Buddhism.1618 For Girard,
sacrifice sets in motion a process of repetitions that engenders, very gradually, what we call our
social and political institutions. The more sacrifices are repeated, the more they tend to become
what we call funerals, marriages, rites of passage, initiations of all sorts, and likewise royalty
political power is always suffused with the sacredall the institutions, in short, of our
culture.1619
According to Tambiah, the Buddhist polities of Southeast Asia have been pulsating,
galactic polities, in which divine kingship was dogged by perennial rebellions, and that
successive usurping kings have made their claims to legitimacy by invoking the personal
charisma of reincarnated righteous rulers and future Buddhas.1620 In India the history of the
cosmos has, since ancient times, been envisaged as cyclic. So there are constant evolutions and
dissolutions of the world like a pulse. Indian religions must attribute the cause of this pulse
to a god, and that inevitably implies an association of god or the goddess with destructive events
and dissolution.1621 For Girard, between undifferentiation and culture, between madness and
reason, between violence and peace, there is only a grading of intensity in the mechanism of
conflictual mimesis. So the (mimetic) cycle continues, as the Hindus rightly saw. The self-same
mechanism serves to pass from violence to peace, and from peace to violence or from reason
to madness and from madness to reason.1622
The South Indian kingdom, according to David Shulman, has no center. Instead there is a
black hole (of a galactic rather than the Calcutta kind). The Tamil version by Kampan
places special emphasis on this perfect king revolted by kingship and becoming a renouncer.
The literature is full of transformations of these extremes, such as Appatthiran of the
Manimkalai who moves back and forth from king to renouncer. It is not that there are good
kings and evil kings as in Western kingship; it is that the king oscillates between extremes. In

1616
1617
1618
1619
1620
1621
1622

Mus, Barabudur. Sketch of a History of Buddhism Based on Archaeological Criticism of the Texts, 282.
Girard, Job: The Victim of His People, 82, 85.
Tambiah, The Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets, 293-4.
Girard, Le sacrifice, 30.
Tambiah, The Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets, 319.
Hardy, The Religious Culture of India. Power, Love and Wisdom, 351.
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 316.

319

other words if the kingdom itself is characterized by instability, so is the inner being of the
king. Ideally the iconic king is possessed of power, pavtti; but pavtti can as easily be
transformed or transposed into its opposite, nivtti, represented in stories of clowning, exile
and ascetic denial. Shulmans emphasis

has been on the Brahmanic clown who brings the

forces of disorder into the center of the sakric order. The clown might be a kind of
disorderly alter ego of the king but he is not explicitly identified as such. The same figure
who is responsible for societys proper order may be said to undermine this order. The situation
is radically different from Western kingship where one can speak of a more stable form of being.
The Indian king exiles himself. In this situation one sees, Obeyesekere thinks, a kind of
social drama(in Victor Turners sense) develop. The first stage portrays the normal order
replete with tension and latent conflict; then there is a stage where these conflicts erupt
disruptively pushing the king from his throne to the shadowy world of impurity, unreality,
geographical remoteness; and finally to a stage of restoration when proper boundaries are
reestablished. In this process the orderly hero can get transformed into the grotesque clown.
The king can be a renouncer, and renouncers are often in practice treated as kings.1623
This social drama could be interpreted in terms of Girardian sacrificial drama of surrogate
victim as a kind of black hole. The Indian and Buddhist oscillating, pulsating and galatic sacred
kingship with no center and the oscillatory and complementary relation between the Buddha
as renouncer and the cakkavatti as world ruler1624could be understood in the light of Girardian
theory on sacred kingship: Girard proposes that in all human institutions it is necessary to
reproduce a reconciliatory murder by means of new victims. The original victim is endowed
with super-human, terrifying prestige because it is seen as the source of all disorder and order.
One must look to this prestige for the source of all political and religious sovereignty. It is
necessary and sufficient for the victim to take advantage of the lapse of time before the sacrifice
and to transform veneration into real power. It is always possible to make a new substitution and
henceforth to sacrifice only a substitute of the substitute. This can proceed as far as the
substitute of the substitute, as in the case, cited by Frazer, of the Tibetan Jalno acquiring too
much real power to be sacrificed so that a further substitute must be found.1625
The symbolic link between sovereignty and sacrifice exists everywhere. Girards theory on
the political power helps us to grasp not only an unmistakable correlation between the
degeneration and restoration of the Buddhist community of the world-renouncer (sangha) and

1623

G. Obeyesekere, King and Brahmin in South Indian Kingship: A Symbolic Perspective, review article of
David Dean Shulman, The King and the Clown in South Indian Myth and Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1985) in Numen, Vol. XXXV, 283-8.
1624
Tambiah, The Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets, 214.
1625
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 53.

320

the political collapses and revivals of kings and their reigns, but also some of the reasons for the
instabilities and pulsating qualities of the traditional Southeast Asian polities.1626
Girard proposes that in all human institutions it is necessary to reproduce a reconciliatory
murder by means of new victims. The original victim is endowed with super-human, terrifying
prestige because it is seen as the source of all disorder and order. Subsequent victims inherit
some of this prestige. Girard looks to this prestige for the source of all political and religious
sovereignty. It is necessary and sufficient for the victim to take advantage of the lapse of time
before the sacrifice and to transform veneration into real power. One might therefore expect that
the interval between the selection of the victim and the sacrifice will be gradually prolonged.
The paradox of ritual gives rise to the paradox of central power. But a purely sociological theory
can never explain, Girard argues, why the royal theatre, supposing that it is always theatre,
should always be a sacrificial drama. Nor sociology can ever explain why the ritual murder
always accords symbols of sovereignty to the victim. The symbolic link between sovereignty
and sacrifice exists everywhere.1627
The violent paradox of the Janus/Buddha of popular beliefs, who is both a universal
monarch (cakravartin) and a radical anarchist, a world conqueror and a world renouncer
simultaneously accepting (if only temporarily) and denying cosmic order1628 can be best
explained by the Girards interpretation of the symbolic link between sovereignty and sacrifice.
As Tambiah mentions,1629 relics and amulets of northeastern world-renouncing forest monks
had a stabilizing and consolidating, namely differentiating effect in the far provinces,
distant from the centre of power, during times of political insecurity. Urban lites are
vigorously seeking out the charismatic attributes of forest monks (radical world-renouncer) in
these potentially disorderly and unstable frontier areas.1630
Girard speaks of the ritual origin of political power. To read from a Girardian perspective,
this unlikely conjunction between the world conquerer and the world-renouncer must be read in
the light of the principles that govern the transformation of collective violence into the sacred.
For Girard, like any human institution, monarchy is at first nothing but the will to reproduce the
reconciliatory mechanism. The scapegoat hypothesis cannot really be demonstrated, since it is
never directly legible in a text. It describes a structuring process, and cannot be deduced
directly from a single text. There is nothing more difficult than detecting the structuring
mechanism at work in a text. For Girard, scapegoating is evident in the process of
sacralization. 1631 Paradoxical unity of world renouncer and world conqueror can be best
1626

Tambiah, World Conqueror and World Renouncer. A Study of Buddhism and Polity in Thailand against a
historical Background, 170.
1627
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 53, 55.
1628
Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights. An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition, 254.
1629
Tambiah, The Buddhist Saints of the Forest and the Cult of Amulets.
1630
Taylor, Forest Monks and the Nation-State. An Anthropological and Historical Study in Northeastern Thailland,
19.
1631
Girard, Job: The Victim of His People, 31-2.

321

explained by Girards understanding of the reconcilatory mechanism.

The relationship between Buddhism and the rise of the monarchical states in the classical
period of Southeast Asian history is customarily referred to symbiotic, that is, one of mutual
benefit. Rulers supported Buddhism because it provided a cosmology in which the king was
accorded the central place and a view of society in which the human community was dependent
on the role of the king. The Buddha engenders the monarch with the power necessary to rule, a
magical potency inherent in the relic. The cetiya reliquary mound thus functions as a magical
center, or axis mundi, for the kingdom. The nature of the interrelationship between Buddhism
and classical monarchical rule in Southeast Asia manifests itself architecturally in the great
cetiya or stupa (Skt., stpa) monuments of Borobudur, Angkor, Pagan, and other ancient
capitals. Angkor, in Cambodia, has been even more widely stuided as a source for
understanding the interrelationships between Southeast Asian kingship and religion, especially
regarding the devarja (god-king) concept. The tooth relic of world-renouncer Buddha was
enshrined in Pagans Schwezigon Pagoda, which became Burmas national palladium.
Buddhism made a decisive contribution to the conception of Southeast Asian kingship and
monarchical rule through its ideal of the dhammarja, who was not only represented by King
Aoka in India but by Southeast Asian monarchs.1632 Its symbolic importance had hardly
diminished in modern times. In Thailand it is generally assumed that the reigning monarch will
become a Buddha in his next, or a very proximate rebirth.
And in Tibet the Dalai Lama was considered a living Buddha-King. In Burma this
coalescene of the two orders is never taken either the modified Thai form of the King who is a
Buddha-to-be or the living-Buddha incarnation of the Tibetan schema.1633 According to this
logic of Buddhist sacred, the imperial state becomes sacralized in Buddhism. In Chinese and
Japanese Buddhism, it was held that the state is indeed a manifestation of the Buddha realm and
the emperor the embodiment of the pure dharmakaya who rules its. In other words, the Buddhist
law and the imperial law are one. The unity of Buddha law and imperial law was openly
taught. The cornerstone of this identification of Buddhist law and imperial law was the belief
that the nation is a manifestation of the Buddha realm. According to this idea of the state, the
destruction of the nation is tantamount to the destruction of the Buddha realm.1634
Buddhism was criticized by Confucianists as an asocial teaching. Allegedly, Buddhist
monks did not respect social relations and thrived as parasites. However, the Mahyna
emphasis on emptiness, for Faure, has two contradictory effects: on the one hand, as can be
seen most clearly in Tantric Buddhism and Chan antinomianism, it resulted in a relativization or
a reversal of social values; on the other hand, it had an integrative aspect wherein the
1632

Swearer, Buddism in Southeast Asia, 112-9.

King, A Thousand Lives Away. Buddhism in Contemporary Burma, 82-3.
1634 Hirata Seik, Zen Buddhist Attitudes to War, in James W. Heisig and John C. Maraldo, Rude Awakenings:
Zen, the Kyoto School, and the Question of Nationalism(Nanzan Studies in Religion and Culture) (Hawaii: University
of Hawaii Press, 1995), 7-11.

1633

322

Madhyamika interpretation of emptiness as synonymous with dependent origination (Skt.

pratya-samutpda) led to a realization of the relativity of the individual. The Buddhist
acculturation in China was significantly determined by the evolution of the relationship of the
Buddhist clergy with the State. Between the fourth and seventh centuries, Buddhis tworldrenouncer definitvely lost its independence and reluctantly became an agent of the imperial
ideology.1635This contradiction or violent paradox of integrative and differentiating Buddhist
world-renunciation could be best explained by the mimetic theory.

VII.

World-Renouncer and Logic of the Sacred

3.

World-Renouncers Dionysian Logic of the Sacred

3.1.

Heidegger, Kyoto School and Zen-nationalism

Mimetic view on the sacred institution, (Buddhist) world-renounciation and world-

renouncer as specialist of the sacred and representative of the dionysian reversal of values and
festive undifferentiation is based on the sacrificial interpretation of the world-renunciation (C.
Malamoud) that is critical of the modern psychological or psychologizing rendering of (Zen)
Buddhism. D.T. Suzukis psychological interpretation of satori and of mystical experience in
general, for which he was indebted to Willaim James, and his unfortunate rendering of the
Chinese term mushin (no-mind or no-thought) as Unconscious, have, accoding to Faure,
provided a fertile ground for misunderstanding and have attracted to Zen psychologists and
psychoanalysts such as C. G. Jung, Erich Fromm, Karen Horney, and Hubert Benoit. Faure
argues that despite his nativist tendency, Suzuki relied heavily on the categories of nineteenthcentury Orientalism.1636 In Suzukis new reading of Zen, there was tendency toward the
psychologization and universalization. 1637 The social anthropologically specific worldrenouncing and yogic dimension of world-renouncers meditation was often overlooked,
decontextualized and universalized in the sense of psychotherapeutic meditation for every men.
Suzuki and Nishida, among others, represents a secondary Orientalism that offers an
idealized, nativist image of a Japanese culture deeply influenced by Zen.1638 As discussed
earlier, (Zen) Buddhist no-mind, no-thought, nothingness and emptiness have to do with the
specific dharma of world-renouncer. nasmuch as meaning is contextual, as Faure has rightly
1635
1636
1637
1638

Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights. An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition, 256-7.
Ibid., 63-4.
Heinrich Dumoulin, Zen im 20. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1993), 20.
Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights. An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition, 53.

323

pointed out, it is highly problematic to translate the Japanese term mu () as Nothingness

and to equate it with the Nichts of the German mystics or conversely to confuse the Western
connotations of Being with those of the Japanese term yu (to have, there is). This
liguistic-cum-ontological confusion, which led Nishida to contrast Oriental Nothingness
with Western Being, has also prompted comparativists to compare Heideggers Being and
Time with Dgens conception of uji (usually translated as being/time). On the basis of a
superficial similarity between the title of one of Dgens sermons, Uji, and Heideggers Being
and Time, comparativist scholars have tended to see in Dgen an existentialist philosopher
avant la letter, who emphasized, against his predecessors, the essential impermanence or
finitude of the phenomenal world. For Faure, Nishidas interpretation of Buddhism is
idiosyncratic, and Nishida himself admitted that his Zen was rather different from the
teaching of the Zen tradition. Faure maintains that Nishida eventually placed the formulas
borrowed from Western philosophy and Buddhism in the service of nationalism, apparently
espousing the kokutai ideology.1639
In the course of Westernization, Zen has been theologized, psychologized, and
systematized. 1640 Reinterpretation of Zen Buddhism in the sense of Western existential
philosophy and very desperate attempt to translate Zen in the categories of contemporary
European philosophy1641 can be well illuminated by Girards mimetic hermeneutics, especially
more dynamic and complex process of intercultural mimesis. The resemblance between the
Western existentialist and Buddhism has been pointed out. Both Buddhism and the Western
existentialism are said to focus attention on tragedy and anxiety. But so-called Buddhist
existential philosophy of (nothingness and emptiness) represents originally and mostly the
anthropologically very specific existence of sacred and liminal world-renouncer. The originally
contextual meaning of the the Buddhist nothingness and emptiness should be comprehended
within the social anthropological context of world-renouncers world-negating dharma. There is
only a supferficial similarity between forest world-renouncers sacrificial meditation on
essential impermanence or finitude of the phenomenal world and western existential philosophy.
During the interbellum period, Heideggers lectures in Freiburg were attended by numerous
students from Asia, especially Japanese students associated with the so-called Kyoto School
which then was engaged in the effort of probing the relation between (Zen) Buddhism and
Western philosophy.

1642

Refering to D. T. Suzuki, Heidegger said: If I understand this man

correctly, this is what I have trying to say in all my writings.1643 Masao Abe (together with other

1639

Ibid., 80-1, 189.

Ernst Benz, Zen in westlicher Sicht: Zen Buddhismus -Zen Snobismus. Weilheim, Otto Wilhelm BarthVerlag, 1962, 78.
1641
Ibid., 18-9.
1642
Fred Dallmayr, Beyond Orientalism. Essays on Cross-Cultural Encounter (New York: State University of New
York Press, 1996), xiii.
1643
Sharf, The Zen of Japanese Nationalism, 1.
1640

324

members of the Kyoto School) finds in recent Western philosophy promising signs of an
incipient nonfoundationalism, that is, of a departure from traditional (rationalist or empiricist)
metaphysics. The leading thinkers typically invoked in this context are Nietzsche and Heidegger
(and subsidiarily French philosophers from existentialism to deconstruction).1644
The similarity between Nishida's concept of nothingness and Heidegger's concept of being
has often been noted. Heideggers meditation on Being as well as Buddhist (or worldrenouncers) meditation on Nothingness could be seen in the light of the scapegoat mechnism.
Looking at Heidegger in the light of the scapegoat mechanism, Girard sees that the issue of the
sacred invariably underlies Heideggers interpretation of the key terms in German and Greek,
and especially his meditation on Being. Heidegger works back toward the sacred. For Girard,
Heidegger rediscovers certain elements relating to the many meanings of the sacred by
examining the philosophical vocabulary. For this reason, he is particularly attracted to preSocratic philosophy, espeically that of Heraclitus, for Girard, the philosphers who is closest to
the sacred. Therefore Heideggers text is at once obscureand fascinating. Re-reading
Heidegger from mimetic perspective, Girard sees that the paradoxes that abound in his
writings are always paradoxes of the sacred. According to Girard, Heidegger becomes crystal
clear when we read him, not in a philosophical light but in the light not really of anthropology
but of the meta-anthropology. Girard himself is not satisfied with the concept of the metaanthropology, but it refers to, for Girard, what happens when the scapegoat mechanism is at last
detected, and the multiplicity of meanings attached to the sacred is understood, not as a form of
thought that mixes everything up together (as with Lvy-Bruhl and Lvi-Strauss) but as the
original matrix of human thought the cauldron in which not only our cultural institutions but
all our modes of thought were forged, through a process of successive differentiation.1645
We must trace Buddhist philsophy of nothingenss and nonduality back beyond the purely
formalistic logic to the social anthropological context of world-renunciation and especially of
world-renouncers dharma and logic. Viewed within the radical anthropological perspective
enabled by the revelation of the victimage mechanism, the paradoxes that abound in the writings
of Kyoto schools philosophical-logical meditation on Buddhist nothingness have something to
do with paradoxes of the sacred represented by Buddhist world-renouncer. Kyoto school
philosophers of nothingness also work back toward the Buddhist sacred. Suzuki attempted, in
his typical fashion, to show that Zen was neither illogical nor anti-intellectual, but that is had its
own type of logic, stemming from pure experience and differing from (or indifferent to) the
dichotomous logic of Western philosophy. Suzukis non-Aristotelian logic is said to be the
only correct way to express the pure and nonrational experience of Zen and to lead one
back to it.1646
1644
1645
1646

Dallmayr, Beyond Orientalism. Essays on Cross-Cultural Encounter, 187.

Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 267.
Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights. An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition, 68-9.

325

Suzukis paradoxical dichotomization of nondualistic Zen and dualistic Western thinking

seems to overlook the fundamental social anthropological dichotomy between Buddhist sacred
and nonrational undifferentiating logic of forest world-renouncer and differential logic of
Buddhist householder in worldly village. This non-Aristotelian logic of Buddhist nondualistic
thinking represents the violently sacred logic of forest world-renunciation, , not daily and
commonsensical logic of worldly village. The pure experience of samdhi1647 seems to
represent the sacrificial experience of the yogic world-renouncer.
Girard follows Nietzsche and especially Heidgger in their analyses of the violent aspects
in classical metaphysics. Heidegger argues that metaphysics does not give access to real
transcendence, to Being itself. It suffers from Seinsvergessenheit, arising from a neglect of the
Ontologische Differenz. Girard shows that Heideggers sacred being is nothing but the
product of interhuman violence: Heideggers difference is in fact born out of violence itself. The
fact that Heidegger, in speaking about Being, praises the myth of Dionysus, is for Girard
significant. Girard rejects the pre(post)modern view on Dionysian sacrality.1648 For Girard,
Heidegger, by dint of dissimulating his Catholicism, gives the possibly false impression that he
recommended a return to paganism. In 1962, his enigmatic statement to fascinated journalists
from Spiegeli that only a god can save us, led to the supposition of an improbable return of
the Greek religion. There was something of Dionysius in this, in other words, a nostalgic choice
of Hellenism over Christianity.1649
The issue of the Buddhist sacred represented by the specialists of the sacred (worldrenouncer) seems to underlie the philosophical or philosophizing (re-)interpretation of the
Kyoto School which was engaged in the effort of probing the relation between (Zen) Buddhism
and Western philosophy (especially Nietzsche and Heidegger). Paradoxes that abound in the
Buddhist philosophy could be considered as violent paradoxes of the sacred specialized by the
world-renouncer. When the scapegoat mechanism polarized around the Buddhist specialists of
the sacred is detected, then the polyvalency and multiplicity of meanings attached to the sacred
is understood as the original matrix of Buddhist thought.
Protesting against the prevailing tendency, among Western scholars, to read the works of
Nishida and the Kyoto school as expressions of a pure philosophy stemming from a pure
experience, Faure has correctly pointed out nationalist ideologies of Kyoto school. Kitaro
Nishida, a founder of what has been called the Kyoto School of philosophy, has been sharply
criticized after the war for leading his support to the imperial(ist) ideology of the Japanese
government, but these criticisms, according to Faure, have not led as in Heideggers case to
a thorough questioning of his philosophy.1650 Absent the entire problematic of the war years, the
1647

Ibid., 176.
Guy Vanheeswijck, The Place of Ren Girard in Contemporary Philosophy, in Contagion Volume 10 (2003),
102-3.
1649
Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benot Chantre, 122-3.
1650
Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights. An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition, 75-6.
1648

326

phrase Kyoto school soon became synonymous with a wide-eyed, open-minded approach to
religious philosophy that seemed to answer the need for a serious encounter between East and
West as few contemporary systems of thought have. The comparative philosophers and
theologians who were giving these Japanese thinkers their warm welcome had simply
overlooked the political implications of their thoughts, especially during World War II.
Today.1651
Sharf has rightly analyzed the Zen of japanese nationalism. Nishidas philosophy has
sometimes been read as a Zen-inspired philosophy based on the notion of pure experience. Zen
has been touted as an iconoclastic and antinomian tradition which rejects scholastic learning
and ritualism in favor of naturalness, spontaneity, and freedom. According to some enthusiasts,
Zen is not, properly speaking, a religion at all, at least not in the sectarian or instituional sense
of the word. Nor is it a philosophy, a doctrine, or even a spiritual technique. Rather, Zen is pure
experience itself- the ahistorical, transcultural experience of pure subjectivity which
utterly transcends discursive thought. The quintessential expression of Zen awakening, the koan,
is accordingly construed as an illogical or nonrational riddle designed to forestall
intellection and bring about a realization of the eternal present. This popular conception of
Zen is, according to Sharf, not only conceptually incoherent but also a woeful misreading of
traditional Zen doctrine, altogether controverted by the lived contingencies of zen monastic
practice.1652
Recently the connection between the wartime complicity of Zen leaders and the Zeninspired philosophy of Nishida was questioned. Nishidas writings on the emperor system and
Japanese culture were used as a philosophical justification of militaristic ideology during the
war, and of the search for cultural uniqueness in postwar Japan. Nishida supported for the
mythological imperial throne, which belongs to the founding ideal of the japanese nation. Kyoto
School was accused of vociferous support for militaristic nationalism during the war. The
case of Martin Heidegger (new revelations of Heideggers associations with the German Nazi
Party ) was one factor we can point to as having brought the political aspect of supposedly
apolitical philosophers and scholars to the fore.1653
On reading Nishida's war writings, the comparison with Heidegger immediately springs to
find. But according to Feenberg, this comparison is misleading. It is true that like Heidegger in
his Nazi phase, Nishida could be heard repeating imperialist slogans. But unlike Heidegger,
whose "private National Socialism" was expressed for a time in the official language of the Nazi
state Nishida represented as a government official, the private thinker Nishida always qualified
1651

Editors Introduction, in James W. Heisig and John C. Maraldo., ed, Rude Awakenings. Zen, the Kyoto School, &
the Question of Nationalism (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995), p. vii ; See also Arisaka 1996: 6.
1652
Robert H. Sharf, The Zen of Japanese Nationalism, in Donald S. Lopez, Jr.(ed) Curators of the Buddha. The
study of Buddhism under Colonialism (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press,1995), 107.
1653
Editors Introduction, in: James W. Heisig and John C. Maraldo(ed), Rude Awakenings. Zen, the Kyto School &
the Question of Nationalism ( University of Hawaii Press, 1995 p. viii, vii.

327

offensive expressions of nationalism from his own culturalist standpoint. Here, for example,
is a passage in which, without actually questioning the Imperial Way ideology that justified the
Pacific War, Nishida attempted to reformulate it culturally.1654 For Van Bragt,1655 the leading
phenomenologists saw public life as just another instance of the inauthentic existence of das
Man, the Kyoto philosophers turned to other source of a more nationalistic stamp. Both
Heidegger and the Kyoto philosophers, each in its own way, betrayed the centrality of the
authentic individual in a state-centered totalitarianism.
iek also critically reflects the relationship between Heidegger and Oriental thought. In
contrast to Heidegger, in Indian thought, the Clearing (Lichtung), in which beings appear does
not need man (Dasein) as the shepherd of being a human being is merely one of the
domains of standing in the clearing which shines forth in and for itself. Man unites himself
with the Clearing through his self-annihilation, through the ecstatic immersion into the
Clearing. The difference, for Zizk, is crucial: the fact that man is the unique shepherd of
Being introduces the notion of the epochal historicity of the Clearing itself, a motif totally
lacking in Indian thought. Heideggers ambivalence, for iek, is symptomatic here. On the one
hand, he repeatedly insisted that the main task of Western thought today is to defend the Greek
breakthough, the founding gesture of the West, the overcoming of the pre-philosophical
mythical Asiatic universe, against the renewed Asiatic threat the greatest opposite of the
West is the mythical in general and the Asiatic in particular. One the other hand, he gave
occasional hints as to how his notions of Clearing and Event resonate with the Oriental notion
of the primordial Void.1656
According to Benavides, G. Tucci also refers admiringly to the military transfiguration
of Zen immediacy and spontaneity, and to the Zen monks, trainers of samurai. Not
misinterpreting Zen, but in fact doing what the formulations of samurai ideology had done
before, he resorts to the mystical clich about the identity between life and death which allows
one to suppress ones blind desire to live. Combined with the cult of heroic death promoted
by fascism, this apotheosis of a beautiful death can now be used in the service of the state. As
in the case of Zen, what seems to fascinate Tucci is death itself. Tucci describes the encounter
with death as the peak of heroism, and Bushido itself as an initiation into death. Tucci claimed
that in the exaltation of war in war as inner experience, to borrow the title of one of Ernst
Jngers glorification of slaughter one transcends ephemeral individuality.1657
Pointing out the chauvinistic elements in Suzukis thought, Faure maintains that the
perhaps the chief cause of war and its fuel were found in the warrior mystique exalted in
1654

Andrew Feenberg, The Problem of Modernity in the Philosophy of Nishida, in J.Heisig and J. C. Maraldo
(eds), Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School and the Question of Nationalism, 151-173, 169.
1655
Jan van Bragt, Kyoto Philosophy Intrinsically Nationalist ?, in James W. Heisig and John C. Maraldo (ed),
Rude Awakenings. Zen, the Kyto School, & the Question of Nationalism, 249-50.
1656
Slavoj iek, On Belief (New York: Routledge, 2001), 10-11.
1657
Benavides, Giuseppe Tucci, or Buddholoy in the Age of Fascism, 169-72.

328

several chapters of the Suzukis book Zen and Japanese Culture. Suzuki seemed, for Faure, to
oblivious to Japans responsibility for the war. Suzuki seemed to forget his triumphalist
accents and gave a rather different interpretation of Zen aestheticism.

3.2.

1658

Buddhology in the Age of Fascism

Dealing with the buddhology in the age of fascism, Benavides argues that Tuccis heroic
interpretations of Zen and his enthusiastic collaboration with the fascist regime should not be
considered as mere political opportunism, but as the result of a deep antagonism toward a
fragmented modern world. Like many others, Tucci seems to have believed for a time that in
the exaltation of violence, in the dissolution of the individual will in the will of the nation which
is ultimately the will of the State, one surpasses, like that combination of hero and saint, the
Sidda, the limits of time, and the illusory limits of individuality.1659 For Girard, totalitarian
regimes have always tried to construct heroic models.1660
This buddhology in the age of fascism could be comprehended against the background of
modern world as a kind of mimetic crisis. For Girard, deconstructing the sacredness of
sacrificial violence, the gospel text has acted as a ferment that brings about the decomposition of
the sacrificial order. Girard has defended the uniqueness of Christianity and claims the latter
broke away from the violent transcendence of the natural religions. Here Girard sees the
principle of the transformations of the Western society whose destiny today is one with that of
human society as a whole. This biblical unveiling (apocalypse) of things hidden since the
foundation of the world brings about the decomposition of the sacrificial order based on
violence. This unveiling of the sacrificial mechanism does not mean less violence. It deprives
modern societies of most of the capacity of sacrificial violence to contain violence and to
establish temporary order. A functional society is one whose institution work without being
constantly disrupted by violence. For instance, in traditional Indian society, this is defined
through the concept of dharma, which basically means the strict separation of castes, and as a
result a society in which everybody does what they are ordained to do.1661
The immediate reaction toward the modern world in mimetic crisis would be to call for a
restoration of the old sacrificial order to prevent such an outbreak of violence. Girard finds it
absurd to hear people calling for a return to sacrificial constraints, which is impossible. From
the moment cultural forms begin to dissolve, for Girard, any attempt to reconstitute them
1658
1659
1660
1661

Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights. An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition, 66, 70-1.
Benavides, Giuseppe Tucci, or Buddholoy in the Age of Fascism, 181-2.
Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benot Chantre, 102.
Girard, Evolution and Conversion: Dialogues on the Origins of Culture, 240.

329

artificially can only result in the most appalling tyranny.1662 Modern world is increasingly
threatened by the resurgence of mimetic crises on a grand scale. In the first half of the 20th
century a mimetic crisis did break out, resulting in two global wars and an enormous amount of
bloodshed. Not only Carl Schmitts writings, but also of (Zen-) nationalism, buddhology in the
age of fasicism and western Buddhism must be read within this context. For a possible solution
to this mimetic crisis of modern world, not only Schmitt,

1663

but also Heidegger, Eliade, Tucci

and Kyoto school philosophers seemed to seek a return to some kind of sacrificial system.
Girard has rejected totalitarian temptations as dangerous: the reactivation of the scapegoat
mechanism, Girard asserts, is always clumsy and suffers from its obvious falsehood.1664
Gustavo Benavidess article1665 examines the wartime connections of Georges Dumzil,
Mircea Eliade, Carl Schmitt, Julius Evola. These thinkers shared a common set of political ideas
and formed a loose network of like-minded persons who tried to associate more closely during
the time of fascism. Their collective worldview orientation embraced fascist elements.1666 In
his analyses of the Bhagavadgt, Jacob Wilhelm Hauer, the Tbingen Indologist extolls prince
Arjunas decision to fight. Hauer became leader of the Deutscher Glaubensbewegung, which he
saw as the religious foundation for National Socialism. From 1934 to 1958 Hauer has published
three almost identical versions of his essay on the yoga of action (karmayoga) in the
Bhagavadgt. The first appeared in 1934 as Eine indo-arische Metaphysik des Kampfes und
der Tat, a small volume, dedicated to Dem kmpfenden Geschlechte, in which Hauer, without
betraying the spirit of the Indian text, validated the bellicose aims of the national socialists in
power. This study was reprinted with minor modifications in 1937, as the fifth chapter, Visnu,
der Wirkende und der tragische Heroismus des Gottgeborgenen, of the first and only volume of
Hauers Glaubensgeschichte der Indogermanen. It appeared, finally, in 1958, as the third
chapter of Der Yoga. Ein indischer Weg zum Selbst. What concerns Hauer in this work is the
need to forget oneself and to fulfill ones heroic duty violently. For Hauer, as for the authors
of the Bhagavadgt , death is ultimately irrelevant, for in killing one does not kill the self, as
this self tman, purua relates to the body as bodies relate to clothes.

1667

C.G. Jung relied on the Indologist Hauer for his understanding of the Bhagavad Gita and the
Hindu system of Kundalini yoga. Hauer, as the noted National-Socialist scholaar interpreted
1662

Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 286 ; Girard, "To Double Business Bound": Essays on
Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology, 82.
1663
Wolfgang Palaver, A Girardian Reading of Schmitt's Political Theology, Telos 93 (1992), 51.
1664
Girard, Job: The Victim of His People , 119-20.
1665
Gustavo Benavides, Irrational Experiences, Heroic Deeds and the Extraction of Surplus, in Horst Junginger
(eds), The Study of Religion under the Impact of Fascism (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2008).
1666
Horst Junginger, Introduction, in Horst Junginger (eds), The Study of Religion under the Impact of Fascism
( Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2008), 56.
1667
Benavides, Irrational Experiences, Heroic Deeds and the Extraction of Surplus, 263-5.

330

the Bhagavad Gita to support his own, and National Socialisms, romantic infatuation with
violence, irrationality, sacrifice, and the heoric deed.1668
Similarly, Tucci, according to Benavides, the foremost Italian Buddhologist of the twentieth
century, who as a member of the Fascist Party published two short books and a number of
articles devoted to the glorification of heroism and self-sacrifice, writes that renunciation, the
slow burning of passions, is not the only form of sacrifice: Sacrifice can also be accomplished
by rendering passions titanic, and by annihilating oneself in the service of a demonic or saintly
idea. Later, with the war already under way, Tucci writes that the Bodhisattva is not only the
being who sacrifices himself, but someone who fights. He is an armor-clad warrior in a
statement which contradicts neither traditional Buddhist exegesis nor the way in which
Buddhism has been actually lived. Through a heroic deed one grabs reality and bends it to
ones will, paying no consideration to everday constraints, to ordinary morality or even to the
rules of logic. Ultimately, according to Benavides, a heroic deed must appear as gratuitous, as
grounded upon itself, as similar in this regard to Schmitts sovereign decision. Benavides has
tried to show that there are affinities between Rudolf Ottos conception of the Holy and
Schmitts Ausnahmezustand, for one can describe the relation between Ottos Holy (or Eliades
hierophanies) and the world of the profane with the words used by Schmitt to portray the
exception.1669
In his article, Gustavo Benavides, as Junginger says, relates the conception of an irrational
religious experience, propagated by many scholars of religion in the interwar period, with their
attempt to overcome the nihilism resulting from World War I. For many of these historians,
the idea of an elitist heroic virility emerged as a chance to subdue the pessimistic feeling of
death and decay predominating the intellectual debates in the aftermath of the war. As a
response to the turmoil World War I sparked, an increasing irrationality took hold of the
academic learning in general and of the study of religion in particular. Alluding to the supposed
a-political bearing of intellectuals, Benavides re-links their scholarship with the general political
circumstances. Placed in that context, a growing irrationality in the study of religion proved to
be quite destructive. Theories of religions based on purely rational considerations diminished
considerably. In place of them, a theoretical understanding of religion which relied on
introspection and religious empathy spread in the study of religion, and also in other disciplines
with religion belonging to the scheme of research. Everything depicted as positivist
reductionism was precluded from a genuine and authentic apprehension of religious
phenomena. But the denunciaiton of reason delivered the study of religion to arbitrariness
1668

Claire Douglas, The Historical Context of Analytical Psychology, in The Cambridge Companion to Jung,
Polly Young-Eisendrath and Terence Dawson (eds) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 31.
1669
Benavides, Irrational Experiences, Heroic Deeds and the Extraction of Surplus, 263-5.

331

and to an uncontrollable subjectivism. Under the impact of fascist influences, such a

development, as Junginger asserts, would necessarily become disastrous.1670
Recovering the historical and ideological context of contemporary Zen discourse in the
West, Sharf attempts to answer the reason why Western intellectuals, scholars of religion,
Christian theologians, and even Catholic monastics are so eager to embrace distortions in the
face of extensive historical and ethnographic evidence to the contrary ? According to Sharf, Zen
entered the purview of Western academe primarily through the proselytizing activities of
Japanese apologists, whose missionary zeal was often second only to their vexed
fascination with Western culture. The result came to be known in Japan as the New Buddhism
(shin bukkyo), which was modern, cosmopolitan, humanistic, and socially responsible.
This reconstructed Buddhism, unter the guise of true or pure Buddhism, was conceived of
as a world religionready to take its rightful place alongside other universal creeds. In their
defense of their creed, Buddhist leaders actively appropriated the ideological agenda of
government propagandists and the nativist movement. They became willing accomplicies in
the promulgation of kokutai (national polity) ideology the attempt to render Japan a culturally
homogeneous and spiritually evolved nation politically unified unter the divine rule of the
emperor. 1671 Analyzing

a certain rhetorical style that, like Suzukis and the Kyoto schools,

remains trapped in Orientalist and nativist structures, Faure considers Zen as an ideological
instrument to promote a cultural image of Japan in the West und as an essential components of
the so-called cultural exceptionalism. 1672

3.3.

Crisis of Modernity, Logic of Place and Carl Schmitt

According to Nishida, the 20th century is marked by a global clash of cultures that will take
military form so long as the contradictions of the european enlightenment are not transcended.
Japanese culture, because of its unique combination of East Asian nothingness and Western
science and technology, can supply that transcendence. Japanese culture was thus a model of the
sort of cultural mediation needed to resolve the

crisis of modernity. Its East Asian

"formlessness" or "emptiness" enabled it to live with unresolved contradictions and to draw

resources from them. Cultural formlessness is the politics of nothingness corresponding to the
philosophical notions of pure experience and place. Nishida's cultural concept of place was
intended to transcend Western-biased universalism in a pluricentric worldview. But for
Feenberg, Nishida's paradoxical concept and logic of place became reflexively involved in his
1670
1671
1672

Junginger, Introduction, 53-4.

Sharf, The Zen of Japanese Nationalism, 108-10.
Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights. An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition, 86.

332

new interpretation of culture with disastrous consequences.1673

Nishida applied his philosophical framework to the Japanese imperial system. For Nishida,
active intuition is to accord faithfully with the facts of national history that have developed with
the myth of the formation of the Japanese nation as their point of origin and main axis, to
empty the self and return to oneness with the emperor as the center of the absolute present in
the manner of all [is] from the imperial household [and returns] to the imperial household.
This imperial household is the all-encompassing locus of (Nishidas) Japanese existence. For
Nishida, the imperial household is the absolute present that includes past and future. In the
course of his writings Nishidas thought developed from pure experience of facts just as
they are and eventually arrived at consideration of the historical world. Through this
development he attempted to provide a logic and an ontological ground for the initial
epistemology of pure experience and thereby rid his standpoint of what he called
psychologism. In this process he formulated such notions as the logic of place. For Nishida,
the absolutely contradictory self-identity is the formula of the self-expression of the absolute.
But this standpoint presents problems when applied to the socio-political realm, as Nishida did
when he meshed it with the Japanese imperial system.

1674

As a solution to the conflict between individualism and holism, Nishida suggested that, in
the particular case of Japanse history, which is centered on the imperial household, both the
individual and the whole mutually negate themselves for the emperorAccording to
Nishidas assertion of kokutai (national polity) ideology, there is an essential identity between
the divine realm of the kami, the divine emperor, and Japan, the divine land.1675 This kyoto
school was not at all on the side of the liberals, since it did support the unity of Japans national
polity and the construction of the so-called Greater East-Asian Co-prosperity Sphere. They
could be classified as fascist, insofar it mimicked the European model in its support of a
corporativist or unionist state and dictatorial politics.1676
Seen from the Girardian viewpoint, the mythological and sacrificial roots and dimensions of
the Kyoto schools (Zen-) Buddhist philsophy can be identified. Palaver provided a Girardian
understanding of sacrificial dimension in Schmitts thinking. In accordance with this strong
sacrificial concept of the state and the political, Schmitt criticizes the political incompetence and
romanticism of liberalism. For Palaver, in order to understand Schmitts political thinking and
his specific political theology we must interpret his work from the perspective of the primitive
sacred. We must go back to some of the mythic root of Schmitts work. Although Schmitt is

1673

Andrew Feenberg, Experience and Culture: Nishida's Path To the Things Themselves, in Philosophy East
and West 49/1 (1999), 38-9.
1674
Christopher Ives, Ethical Pitfalls in Imperial Zen and Nishida Philosophy, in James W. Heisig and John C.
Maraldo(ed), Rude Awakenings. Zen, the Kyto School, & the Question of Nationalism, 23-4.
1675
Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights. An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition, 77.
1676
Yko Arisaka, The Nishida Enigma: the Principles of the New World Order(1943), in Monumenta Nipponica
51/ 1 (1996), 81-106.

333

not really a representative of sacrificial thinking in the sense of archaic myths, he represent,
with a sacrificial concept of the political and in his personal involvement in Nazi politics,
represents a sacrificial Christianity, the historical type of Christianity that is in danger of
diminishing the gulf between the mythic religions of archaic societies and the full scope of
biblical revelation. Schmitts understanding of state-centered transcendence is closer to the
immanent transcendence resulting from the scapegoat mechanism than to a real divine
transcendence.1677
By exploring the inextricable relationship between "violence and the sacred," between
generative violence and the Buddhist sacred specialized by the world-negating and selfemptying world-renouncer, I aim to offer new insights into the issues discussed in Rude
Awakening: Zen, the Kyoto School , and the Question of Nationalism. In the light of surrogate
victims mechanism, we have already interpreted the Dionysian, wild and rude awakening of the
world-renouncing specialists of the (violent) sacred or wild enlightened being in his locus of
choatic wildness. Kyto philosophy was intrinsically nationalistic in the sense that the basis
tenet of their religious philosophy the notion of absolute nothingness was conducive to
nationalism.

1678

The Kyto school made it clear that the current conflict represented Japans ascension as the
leading world-historical race. To them as to all other Japanese patriots, the war in Asia and the
Pacific was a holy war, and represented an unprecedented struggle for the attainment of a
transcendent Great Harmony (Taiwa). According to some scholars, no group helped defend
the state more consistently and enthusiastically than did the philosophers of the Kyto faction,
and none came closer than they did to definding the philosophic contours of Japanese fascism.
Robert Sharf accuse Nishida of being a quintessential nihonjinron philosopherand relate his
thesis of the unity of subject and object to fascist ideology. Sharf argues that Nishida was
himself guilty of the most spurious forms of nihonjinron speculation.1679
A number of passages from the Nishidas notorious paper on The New World Order, in
his notorious paper on "The New World Order", prepared at the invitation of the War Cabinet in
1943, shows his fundamental agreement with the ultranationalists geopolitical conception
and his support for the construction of the Greater East-Asian Co-prosperity Sphere. No one
make sense of the the "Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere," without reference to Japanese
imperialism. Nishida treats the imperial house a particular because it is a historical entity as
if it were a metaphysical universal, a place of nothingness which transcends all particularities
and embraces the world in its emptiness.1680
In my view, this place of nothingness which undifferentiates all differences and embraces
the world in its emptiness seems to be related to the place of violent sacred and of reconcilatory
1677
1678
1679
1680

Wolfgang Palaver, Schmitts Critique of Liberalism, in Telos 102 (Winter 1995), 43-71, 53-69.
For this argument see Van Bragt, Kyoto Philosophy Intrinsically Nationalist ?, 245-52.
Robert Sharf, Zen and Japanese Nationalism in History of Religions 33/ 1 (1993), 23.
Arisaka, The Nishida Enigma: the Principles of the New World Order(1943), 81-106.

334

victim. In seeing the absolute present and the imperial household as one and locating the
universal principle in the particular thing (the imperial household), Nishida helped provide a
philosophical foundation for the holy war being waged in the name of the emperor. This
paralleled the tendency of traditional Zen to accept and even glorify its political actuality,
whether the Kamakura warrior government or the modern imperialist state.

1681

Despite its

problematic conclusion, Nishidas geopolitical concept of place draws together the many
strands of the Western concept of experience in an original combination based on a concept of
nothingness he identifies with the essence of Buddhist and Asian thought.
According to Faure, the expression to empty the self and see things, for the self to be
immersed in things is a reminiscence of Dogens. Nishida frequently quotes Dogen in this
nationalist und expansionist context. Nishida ended up equating the actual with the kokutai
and the Imperial House. The mythic dimension of Nishidas philosophy and its logics could be
found. Nishida represents a mystical conception of society (or nation), saying every
historically crystallized society beings from a religious ground from what Durkheim has
called le sacr1682.

1683

Nishida claimed that the imperial house, as the living form of Japan's

identity of contradictions, could pacify the world by uniting it under one roof. Even apart from
the irrelevance of this claim to the mimetic crisis of modernity, such an interpretation of the
mythological emperor system and imperial throne is deeply problematic.
Nishidas "place of absolute nothingness," is difficult to understand without reference to
Buddhism. According to Nishida, the "formlessness" or "emptiness" of Japanese culture enables
it to harbor unresolved contradictions in itself. This formlessness reflects at the historicocultural level the philosophical notions of pure experience and absolute nothingness. Here for
Feenberg, these apparently abstruse philosophical categories turn out to signify a unique
cultural identity and role. But as Feenberg has rightly pointed out the disturbing aspect of
Nishidas thought, his conception of cultural self-affirmation seems to have gone well beyond
the search for fruitful dialogue and embraced military struggle as a positive moment. Nishida
was an enthusiastic advocate of the emperor system. Indeed, for Nishida the imperial house
lay at the center of both the political and cultural systems. As such, he called it the "identity of
contradictions," situating it mysteriously beyond the reach of his own concept of action as a
system of reciprocities. According to Feenberg, this would seem to absolutize the state as an
expression of the emperor's will. The mythological emperors will was for Nishida a place
(basho) of nothingness without particular content.

1681

1684

Ives, Ethical Pitfalls in Imperial Zen and Nishida Philosophy, 25.

Nishida, Kitar, Last Writings: Nothingness and the Religious Worldview, trans. David A. Dilworth (Honolulu:
University of Hawaii Press, 1987), 116.
1683
Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights. An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition, 82-3.
1684
Andrew Feenberg, The Problem of Modernity in the Philosophy of Nishida, in J. Heisig and J. C. Maraldo
(eds), Rude Awakenings: Zen, the Kyoto School and the Question of Nationalism, 151-173, 167-8.
1682

335

3.4.

Samdhi as World-renouncers Grave

This (Buddhist) place (basho) of nothingness could be explicated in terms of worldrenouncers locus amoenus. 1685 Wild forst (araya) as world-renouncers place of
nothingness and of empty space is not defined in any positive way, but rather as something that
is missing: it is the empty space delineated by two divergent paths, an undifferentiated and
unexplicated break in continuity. 1686 Recent authors have found some affinities between
Nishidas theory of basho (place, topos, or chora) as the empty field of
contradictions, and deconstruction, showing the relevance of his thought to contemporary
debates.1687 But the unveild differentiating mechanism of surrogate victim around this chaotic
and undifferentiated locus of amoenus and empty space or field of contradictions should be
deconstructed.
This founding paradox of Buddhist differentiating place of (violently undifferentiated)
absolute nothingness and emptiness could be best explained by examining Girards discovery of
the zero hour of culture and zero degree of structure, which is also the hour of sacrifice
the founding sacrifice. This zero hour absolutely and radically separates the structures of the
cultural order and those of the disorder of undifferentiated violence, while transforming the one
into the other.1688 Sacrificial origins and mythological roots of the Kyoto schools philosophy
could be traced back to the Buddhist sacred represented by the world-renouncing specialists of
the sacred and representatives of simulated reversal of values that takes place at festivals.
Nishidas geopolitical concept of place, paradoxical logic of place and place of nothingness
could be thought of as representing the place of the reconcilatory victims death or ritual
expulsion. As we have seen, the Buddhist place of nothingness symbolizes the sacrificial place
of world-renouner. Buddhist place of nothingness has something to do with the saced place of
world-renouncers (mediative) death.
What needs to be noted is the sacrificial dimension of philosophical discourse in Kyto
school. The allegedly deconstructive and postmodern Buddhist philosophy of nothingness and
its logic of the place of nothigness has proven to be sacrificial and sacralizing. Derrida shows
that the two terms (pharmakon and pharmakos) share more than just their lexical ties. Writing
as pharmakon has structural and functional affinities with the pharmakos in Greek culture: the
scapegoat, the sacrificial victim whose violent expulsion purifies the community. According to
Mckenna, Derrida marks Platos silence about these affinities, but he is silent in turn about the
properly sacrificial dimension of philosophical discourse, a dimension in which his own
1685
1686
1687
1688

Shee, Tapas und Tapasvin in den erzhlenden Partien des Mahbhrata, 306.
Malamoud, Cooking the World. Ritual and Thought in Ancient India, 81.
Arisaka, The Nishida Enigma: the Principles of the New World Order(1943), 3.
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 312-4.

336

silence is implicated.1689 A purely formal logical approach to Buddhist nothingeness fails to

grasp the violent paradoxes of logics of Buddhist world-renunciation.
As discussed above, Nishida treats the imperial house as a place of nothingness which
transcends all particularities and embraces the world in its emptiness. This (Buddhist) place of
nothingness and of mythological imperial house could be understood as a place of the violent
sacred and of the surrogate victims death. The central points out from which everything
radiates and which nearly always constitute symbolic sites of collective unity for example, in
the Greece, the tombs of heroes, the omphalos, the stone of the agora and, finally, that perfect
symbol of the polis, Hestia, the common hearth - all designate the very place where the
surrogate victim perished or is supposed to have perished.1690 The discovery of the surrogate
victim mechanism has led Girard to identify a kind of key-point that is a structuring
singularity. The paradoxical logic of place in Nishidas philosophy and in Kyoto school
could be understood from the Girardian perspective on the generative and structuring power of
the surrogate victim as a structuring singularity. 1691 Girard describes the generative
morphogenesis leading from the violent origin to the diversity of rituals, institutions and
cultures.
The (Buddhist) place of nothingness originally designates the place of victims sacrificial
death. In the Indian context, samdhi (a higher level of concentrated meditation) esignates
metonymically both the spiritual state of the world-renouncer and the grave in which he is
buried alive.1692 Samdhi, which usually signifies the state of enlightenment while alive, has
become synonymous with death as another form of enlightenment. The memorial stone which is
placed over the yogic world-renouncers grave is called samdhi as well. The samdhi (grave)
of powerful world-renouncer often become objects of pj and pilgrimage. In the past, ritual
suicide by fasting, drowning or self-immolation may have been recommended, but at
present only those radical world-renouncers who feel that the end is approaching, may
deliberately undertake the Big Trip North, going on foot to the Himalayas, drinking only water
till the body drops.1693 Yogic samdhi reflects a dissolution.

1694

Samdhi has been described as a non-dualistic state of consciousness in which the

consciousness of the experiencing subject becomes one with the experienced object. The violent
origins of this Buddhist non-dualistic state could be traced. At Saijji in Odagawara (Japan),
there is stone of the fire samdhi(kajseki), supposedly the stone on which Eshun, a Buddhist
nun, immolated herself. It is disturbing that most nuns who have a name to posterity were
handsome women who defaced themselves. In one case at least, such self-denial was perceived
1689
1690
1691
1692
1693
1694

McKenna, Violence and Difference. Girard, Derrida, and Deconstruction, 28.

Girard, Violence and the Sacred (New York/London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005), 322.
Scubla, Towards a Morphogenetic Anthropology: Singularity Theory and Generative Violence, 118.
Parry, |Sacrificial Death and the Necrophagous Ascetic, 97.
Hartsuiker, Sdhus. Holy Men of India, 100.
Hans H. Penner, Cosmogony as Myth in the Vishnu Pur a, inHistory of Religions 5/2 (1966), 298.

337

as insufficient, and had to be pushed one step further, to the point of self-immolation. We are
told that Eshun, when she approached death, prepared a large bonfire and sat down in the
middle of the flames. Although this episode is usually presented as a kind of apotheosis, there
may be, according to Faure, a darker sociological reality hidden behind female suicide.
Eshuns life is a testimony to male prejudices and the sexual harassment encountered by
nuns.1695 In this story, we can decode the surrogate victims mechanism hidden behind Buddhist
self-immolation on the stone of the fire samdhi.

4.

Mythology and Facism in Japan and Germany

4.1.

Nishidas Logic of Place and Schmitts Nomos der Erde

According to Palaver, mythic paganism is visible where Schmitt quotes Hlderlins

polytheistic poem as a confirmation of his hope in a new pluralistic nomos of the earth.

1696

Schmitt hopes to give orientation in a world deprived of sacred space and thererefore provides a
antiuniversalist concept of space.

1697

Schmitt focuses on soil and his concept of international

law is geopolitically oriented. According to Schmitt, nomos is the creation of a spatial order.
The insight into the close relationship between the spatial order, the nomos, and the scapegoat
mechanism is, for Palaver, visible in Schmitts reflections on the nomos. Schmitt indirectly
refers to the sacrificial roots of nomos in his reflections on the similarity between Raum and
Rom, too. His emphasis on the spatial location of Rome inherently means a reference to the
myth of Romulus and Remus. Accoring to this Roman myth, it was a murder that created the
boundaries of the city. This is an hint at the sacrificial roots of Roman spatial order. The original
nomos is therefore a direct product of the scapegoat mechanism. Scapegoat mechanism
produces a first differentiation between the inside, that is the place of the killed victim, and the
outside, that is the lynching mob encircling the victim.1698 Founding sacrifices show that the
place of the victim functions as the center of every sacred space. The killing of the victim
creates order and spatial orientation.1699

1695

Faure, The Power of Denial. Buddhism, Purity and Gender, 202-3.

Cf. Klaus-M. Kodalle, Politik als Macht und Mythos : Carl Schmitts Politische Theologie (Stuttgart:
Kohlhammer, 1973), 123-130.
1697
Wolfgang Palaver, Die mythischen Quellen des Werkes von Carl Schmitt. Eine theologische Kritik.
Habilitationsschrift. Innsbruck, 1996, 141-4.
1698
Cf. Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 102; Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly, The Gospel and
the Sacred: Poetics of Violence in Mark (Mineapolis: Fortress, 1994), 118-120.
1699
Palaver, Die mythischen Quellen des Werkes von Carl Schmitt. Eine theologische Kritik, 137-9.
1696

338

Nishidas philosophical support for the construction of the Greater East-Asian Coprosperity Sphere throught the geopolitical logic of place as well as Carl Schmitts Groraum
theory must be understood within the context of Japanese and German imperialism.
Simultaneously with the Nazi occupation of foreign countries in Europa, Schmitt more and
more focused on the relationship between space and international politics. On April 1, 1939,
only two weeks after Hitler had invaded Czechosklovakia, Schmitt introduced his concept of
Groraum (large space). His Groraum theory clearly supported Hitlers imperialism. Schmitts
theory was primiarly focusing on geopolitical aspects. Schmitts focusing on the spatial
dimension of international politics is a part of his indirect involement in Nazi politicis. He
systematized his insights on the spatial dimension of nomos in his book Der Nomos der Erde
from 1950. Heraclitus is one of Schmitts examples to clarify the original spatial dimension of
nomos. He refers affirmatively to Heraclituss identification of nomos and wall, points to the
sacred location of walls, and hints at the spatial dimension in Heraclituss fragment about the
different human nomoi which are nourished by the godlike nomos. According to Schmitt, peace
and laws are based on spatial enclosures(Hegungen im rumlichen Sinne). 1700 Nomos is
originally a sacred location.1701
Logos of place in Nishida religious philosophy as well as Nomos der Erde in Schmitts
political theology were not not unrelated with the "Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere"
and Groraumtheorie in Jpanese and German military expansionism. The place of (Buddhist)
nothingness and emptiness also seems to originally represent the sacred place of the
reconcilatory victim. For Palaver, traces of the scapegoat mechanism are also visible in
Schmitts reference to Jost Trier article about nomos as a fence-word. The enclosing men-ring
quite openly shows the basic structure of the lynch mob surrounding its victim. It is therefore
not by chance that Trier mentions the fact that sacrifices were usually performed inside this ring.
Schmitts reconstruction of the original meaning of nomos clearly points at the scapegoat
mechanism as the origin of spatial order. In order to overcome the modern separation of space
and law, Schmitt attempted to recover and to preserve the spatial dimension of the original
nomos.1702
In the following issues in Nishidas philosophical system, sacrificial and mythic roots and
dimensions could be analyzed: an affirmation of the myth of Japanese origins, the
accompanying pseudo-history of an unbroken lineage of emperors descended from
cosmogonic kami, an advocacy of submission to the state and fusion with the emperor and a
bias toward harmony and unity. According to Ives, Nishida, whom many have deemed a highly
sophisticated, modern thinker with a criticial view of history, appeared to accept as literally true
divine history unfolding around an unbroken imperial lineage since the founding of the nation
1700

Reinhardt Knodt, Der Nomos der Erde Eine Betrachtung zum Raumbegriff bei Carl Schmitt, in
Philosophisches Jahrbuch 98(1991), 326.
1701
Palaver, A Girardian Reading of Schmitt's Political Theology, 122-4.
1702
Palaver, Die mythischen Quellen des Werkes von Carl Schmitt. Eine theologische Kritik, 139.

339

by Jinmu revered by ultranationalists. Nishida affirmed if not glorified this pseudo-history,

as well as both the centrality of the imperial system to Japanese culture.1703

4.2.

Philosophy of Nothingness as World Philosophy

There are some similarities and analogies concerning mythology and facism in Japan and
Germany.

1704

As Ives has rightly aruged, Japans own aggressive imperialism was in part as a

kind of a mimetic stance toward the very West whose imperialism Japan was ostensibly
trying to eradicate in Asia.

1705

Schmitt is a representative of sacrificial Christianity, the

historical type of Christianity that is in danger of diminishing the gulf between the mythic
religions of archaic socieities and the full scope of biblical revelation. For Palaver, Schmitts
understanding of transcendence is closer to the immanent transcendence resulting from the
scapegoat mechanism than to a real divine transcendence.

1706

The mythological dimensions of

the Buddhist Kyoto school is more explicit in a certain sense. German admirers of the Japanese
kokutai including Hitler had jealousy for the mystical unity of imperial house and people,
untouchedness by Christianity, and for the Japanese ideal of warlike heroic thinking.1707
The development of the nationalist tendencies in Nishidas thought can be seen in the work
of his disciples. It reached its full expression in the symposia organized in 1942 by the group on
the philosophy of world history, the so-called right wing of the Kyto school. These symposia
advocated total war as the unification of all dimensions of human life. Nishitani, an authority
on Zen who is perceived as the main representative of the Kyto school today, made the
following comments : Is it not that the political consciousness of the Germans is more
advanced? I believe too that in people such as Hitler the consciousness of the necessity to
restore an interior order is clearer than in Japanese rulersAlthough today the various peoples
of the East have no national consciousness in the European way, this is perhaps a chance for the
construction of the Coprosperity sphere., because it means that they are being constituted as
people of the Coprosperity sphere from a Japanese point of view. Nishitani, Faure asserts, has
never manifested any regret for such youthful errors, nor has this aspect of his work ever been
discussed among his disciples.1708
1703

Ives, Ethical Pitfalls in Imperial Zen and Nishida Philosophy, 32-4.

See 2.3. Mythologie und Faschismus in Japan und Deutschland (Klaus Antoni: Shint und die Konzeption des
japanischen Nationalwesens (kokutai). Der religise Traditionalismus in Neuzeit und Moderne Japans; in: Handbuch
der Orientalistik: Abt. 5, Japan; Bd. 8; Leiden, Boston; Kln, Brill, 1998, 278-83 ).
1705
Ives, Ethical Pitfalls in Imperial Zen and Nishida Philosophy, 38.
1706
Palaver, A Girardian Reading of Schmitt's Political Theology, 116.
1707
Klaus Antoni: Shint und die Konzeption des japanischen Nationalwesens (kokutai), 281, 263. See also 2.3.1.
Deutsche Bewunderer des japanischen kokutai (279-282).
1708
Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights. An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition, 85-6.
1704

340

Nishidas emphasis on logic of magnanimity and harmony exhibits strong sacrificial

implications.1709 Nishidas thought contributed indirectly to an expansionist foreign policy by
helping foster the sense of unity as an us in an antagonistic relationship with a Western
them (a unity Japanist discourse has claimed was not politically constructed and maintained
but present in Japanese society from the beginning because of shared blood, language, and
spirit). The strong sacrificial implications of Nishidas philosophy could be also found in his
tendency to downplay conflict (in actuality and in principle) and to move too quickly to an
affirmation of harmony. Despite his overall disavowal of domestic conflict, Nishida accepted
its international form.1710
Girards theory on victimage mechanism that generates internal cohesion, peace and
harmony by channeling all aggressions and rivalries outside may provide critical reflections on
this sacrificial tendency. Human societies commonly avoid widespread internal conflict and thus
preserve the social order by channeling innate human hostility toward a scapegoat and by
channeling the "bad" energy into prearranged outlets. Society protects itself against its own
internal dissensions, Girard argues, by channeling its vengeance and animosity onto a single
victim and by channeling accumulated violence outside of the community into the realm of the
sacred.
Through this sacrificial concept of the state and the political, Schmitt criticizes the political
incompetence of liberalism. His contradictory attempt to overcome a mimetic crisis of
modernity with the help of sacrificial politics corresponds to his personal involvement in Nazi
politics. As Palaver has rightly maintained, this, however, would be a dangerous attempt to
return to sacrificial religion.1711 The general weakening of the system of prohibitions and
obligations of solidarity could be traced to the desacralizing influce of Christianity. Once the
ties of solidarity among members of the community have withered, the intensification of
mimetic rivalries no longer generates the polarization against a single victim that is proper to
sacrificial crises. Girard hypothesizes a burgeoning mimetic crisis in the modern world. As
Dupuy has argued, the modern world can be described as a low-gear mimetic crisis, without
catastrophic escalation or resolution of any kind.. But the economy gives modern societies the
capacity, not only to resist, but even to feed on the growing undifferentiation of the world and
the exacerbation of the resulting mimetic phenomena.1712
As an attempts to overcome or resolve the crisis of modernity, the philosophical logics of
Kyoto School was developed. A similar turn to national identity as a solution to the problems of
modernity in a state of mimetic crisis or sacrificial crisis is to be found in contemporary German
thought, for example Carl Schmitt or Martin Heidegger. The interrelationship between the
1709

Ives, Ethical Pitfalls in Imperial Zen and Nishida Philosophy, 26.

Ibid., 35-6.
1711
Palaver, Die mythischen Quellen des Werkes von Carl Schmitt. Eine theologische Kritik, 64.
1712
Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Detour and Sacrifice: Ivan illich and Ren Girard, in Lee Hoinacki and Carl Mitcham (eds),
The Challgens of Ivan Illich: a Collective Reflection (New York: Suny Press, 2002), 189-205.
1710

341

Kyoto School, Japan romantic school and the crisis of modernity was elucidated. Implicit in
Nishidas thought was an attempt to transcend the limitations of modern philosophy,
particularly through his concept of the place of Nothingness. This concept can be seen as an
attempt to limit the syncretic power of Western thought by situating it within a
transexistential context. Romatnic character of Nishida philosophy, which could be defined
as a logical symbolism in a transhistorical system of hermeneutic categories, has been
pointed out. Nishida philosophy was characterized by as a form of aestheticism or romanticism.
Attacking on modernity and returing to the sacrificial and mythological past, Kyoto school
attempted to overcome the modern. The members of the Kyoto School expressed their
antimodernism in liteary forms, grasping the problem not as one of direct political action but
as a crisis in cultural identity. But their philosphical attempts to overcome the crisis of
modernity resulted in a state-centered fascism.

4.3.

1713

Mimetic Crisis of Modernity and Kyoto School

In order to overcome the mimetic crisis of modernity, the philosophers of nothingness

attempted to return to logic of the Buddhist sacred and to the Dionysian and nondualistic, in the
Girardian sense violently undifferentiating logic of the sacred specialized by world-renouncer.
But this philosophical attempts to decontexualize and universalize originally world-renouncers
specific logic for the alternative modernity and for the world-philosophy turns out to be
dangerous and futile, especially from the viewpoint of social ethics. Zen awakening lacks any
fundamental or inherent connection to the realm of ethics. Ichikawa has rightly criticized, the
ethical stumbling of Zen masters derives from the (sacrificial) harmony extolled in much of
the discourse about Zen and Japanese culture. Living like the water that takes the shape of
whatever vessel into which it is poured, Zen Buddhists run the risk of succumbing to a kind of
flexible, shifting submission that lacks the consistency of principles, convictions, and actions
necessary for a critical social ethic. Representatives of the Zen tradition have also applauded
how the spiritual state of an awakened Zen Buddhists is like a mirror, reflecting what comes
before it without discrimination, beyond duality, in an absolute objectivity that does not ask
why ? or wrestle with issues of good and evil. This is often offered to the West as a way to
overcome the intolerance and conflict criticized by Zen figures asdestructive ramifications of
dualistic thinking.1714
This undifferentiated state of awakened Buddhas that is without discrimination and
beyond duality could be understood as a state of violent undifferentiation in Girards words that
1713

Kevin Michael Doak, Dreams of Difference. The Japan Romatnic School and the Crisis of Modernity (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1994), xxvi-xxviii.
1714
Ives, Ethical Pitfalls in Imperial Zen and Nishida Philosophy, 30, 21-2.

342

does not wrestle with issues of good and evil. This violently sacred state of intoxication
represented by Budda as great muni could be considered to mean the Dionysiac state of mind
erasing all manner of differences.1715 Forest Buddhas as sacred munis represents the reversal of
values at festivals. A Dionysian state is that of Rausch, rapture, which can be also translated
as intoxication. Buddhist world-renouncers yogic and meditative state of mind seems to
represent the undifferentiated and hallucinatory state of Dionysiac mania (see Girard,Things
310). Thus Buddhist world-renouncers Dionysian, nondualistic, violently undifferentiating and
nonsensical logic has served as a kind of anti-logic and anti-structure to the dualistic,
differentiated and commonsensical thinking of worldly householder.
The freedom espoused by Zen and by Buddhism as a whole is, as Seik rightly claims,
fundamentally nonethical(as opposed to unethical) in nature. Zens position that the adepts
world of satori can be reached only through a transcendence of dualistic notions of good and
evil is one that leaves no grounds for dinstinguishing the socially beneficial from the socially
harmful. Not only is it bereft of social significance, it is also incapable of providing any sort of
foundation for social development.1716 Buddhist world-renouncers enlightenment (satori) can
be reached only through a Dionysian transgression or violent undifferentiation of dualistic,
differentiated and commonsensical notions of good and evil. This violently sacred logic of
forest world-renouncer would be dangerous to be imitated by normal and worldy people and to
be decontextualized and universalized for the world-philosophy. This decontextualization of
violently undifferentiating and transgressive logic of sacred world-renouncer turns out to be a
highly dangerous attempt.
In order to overcome the mimetic crisis of modernity with its anxiety, the philosopher of
nothingness with their impatience with plurality and uncertainty are were drawn to authoritarian
or totalitarian solutions. The Japanese nativists discomfort with the seeming triumph of
scientific reason, and their yearning for a spiritual solution to the problems of modernity, for
Sharf, mirrored out own. The notion of pure Zen would be attractive precisely because it held
out the possibility of an alternative to the godless and indifferent anomic universe bequeathed
by the Western Enlightenment. This reconstructed Zen, according to Sharf, offered an
intellectually reputable escape from the epistemological anxiety of historicism and pluralism.
But impatience with plurality and uncertainty in the intellectual realm, as Sharf rightly claims,
can lead all too readily to impatience with plurality and uncertainty in the realm of politics. It
may not be mere coincidence that a surprising number of those who saw Zen as a solution to
spiritual anxiety were drawn to authoritarian or totalitarian solutions to social and political
unrest. In a similar vein, Hannah Arendt has commented on the exasperation we sometimes

1715

Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 96, 160-1.

1716 Seik, Zen Buddhist Attitudes to War, 12.

343

feel when confronted with the fact that Plato and Heidegger were drawn to tyrants and
Fhrers.1717
The emphasis on the Buddhist, more exactly world-renouncers nothingness in Nishidas
philosophy and Kyoto school could be compared with the Schmitts emphasis on the exception
(Ausnahme). The radically decontexualized paradoxical logic of place and of nothingness
originally represents the exceptional, anti-structural and anti-logical logic of world-renunciation.
Buddhist logic of nonduality could be described as a Dionysian logic representing the reverals
of values at festivals. Nothingness or emptiness in Buddhist philosophy of Kyoto school ought
to be interpreted social anthropologically rather than in terms of purely formal logical analysis,
that is to say from the viewpoint of world-renouncing nothingness of the representative of the
reverals of values at festivals.

4.4.

Absolute Nothingness as a Field of Absolute Affirmation

As discussed earlier, world-renoucing logic of nothingness and emptiness means a antistructural exception in relation to the world order. The sacred but liminal and ambivalent worldrenouncer is considered as an exception to the worldly householder. For Girard the relation
between the scapegoat mechanism and the cultural order emerging out of it is similar to
Schmitts relation between exception and rule. The scapegoat mechanism is an exceptional
situation at the height of a mimetic crisis. It creates the essential differences of time, space, and
morality that make the subsequent order possible. As soon as peace is restored and normal
cultural life is established, the direct act of scapegoating recedes. Normal life, the rule, comes
to the fore. But the scapegoat mechanism remains the hidden structural principle constituting
the whole order. It is cutures symbolic matrix.1718 The scapegoat mechanism itself is a model
of the exception. Outlining a they of signs and signification Girard emphasizes the model of the
exception as the simplest symbolic system. Like the short straw, which is the exception, the
reconcilatory victim is the transcendental signifier. He or she gives the meaning to the order that
emerges out of this mechanism.1719
The philsophers of nothingness tried to overcome the modernity of the West by way of
modern Japan from the perspective of absolute nothingness that Nishida had opened up. Their
response to the (mimetic) crisis of modernity included such things as a (dangerous) return to the
divinization of the emperor and an absolutization of his present authority and an (mimetic)
acceptance of German Geopolitik as a strategy to realize the ideals. This sacrificial logic entails
1717
1718
1719

Sharf, "Whose Zen? Zen Nationalism Revisited," 49-50.

Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 162.
Ibid., 99-104 ; Palaver, A Girardian Reading of Schmitt's Political Theology, 53.

344

a denial of the conscious self, a no-self or no mind that extinguishes the individual ego. As
a result, the absolute negation of all things, including culture and science, is converted directly
into an absolute affirmation.

1720

Through the mechanism that produces culture, the undifferentiating (absolute) negation of
all things is converted directly and dialectically into an differentiating (absolute) affirmation.
The founding mechanism governs this shift from chaotic and undifferentiated nothingess,
emptiness and nonduality (disorder) to the absolute affirmation and sacralizing absolutization of
present world order. The founding and differentiating mechanism of surrogate victim transforms
the abosolute negation and world-renouncing undifferentiation of all things (choatic and
Dionysian disorder) into absolute affirmation of world order. This sacrificially differentiating
logic of Buddhist sacred represented by world-renouncer could be described in terms of the
interplay of order and disorder, of difference lost and retrieved.
The gaze of enlightenment the totalizing (non) perspective of absolute
nothingness1721 also could be read against the background of world-renouncing (non) or (anti) perspective of world-renouncer in his yogic meditation on nothingness. For Faure, Chan
monasteries defined a new domain, a utopian space and was a non-lieu and the scene of
religious non-lieux; a cultic center, yet decentering or displacing the old spatial frame. This
Budhist place is a place ruled (in theory) by the law of emptiness and functioning as a kind of
negative field in which all worldly values were canceled, dismissed, or inverted.1722
This Buddhist place ruled by the law of world-renouncing and violently undifferentiated
emptiness has functioned as a kind of negative and negating field in which all worldly values
were inverted. This Dionysian and choatic place of the Buddhist violent sacred has served as the
violent matrix of the world order. The place of founding victim becomes the matrix of order.
The victim is the matrix of difference.1723 Order and difference owe their origin to the sacred
locus of mystified expulsion of the founding victim. Being the locus of both good and bad
violence, the victim acquires an air of mystery, of awesome power, potentially dangerous but
transcendent. Violent paradox of Buddhist culture based on the differentiating nothingness and
emptiness could be best explained in the light of Girardian understanding of empty world
renouncer as the matrix of difference.
For Palaver, violence play a role in Schmitts decisionism. His later work clearly shows that
a violent deed is at the beginning of all law (nomos). In his reflections on the Greek word nomos
he points out that the first and original meaning of this word is nehmen, i.e., to take.
Schmitt is aware of the violent character of this primordial nomos. As soon as a situation of
order and peace is created, however, the violent origin of order is forgotten and there seems to
1720

Minamoto Ryen, The Symposium on Overcoming Modernity, in James W. Heisig and John C. Maraldo (ed),
Rude Awakenings. Zen, the Kyto School, & the Question of Nationalism, 201, 218.
1721
Sharf, "Whose Zen? Zen Nationalism Revisited," 50.
1722
Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights. An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition, 162.
1723
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 162.

345

be nothing but normativism and positivism. In Political Theology he talks about the normal
situation in which the element of decision recedes to a minimum and the norm seems to be
everything. Palaver argues that there is a similarity between Schmitt and Girard concerning the
violent dimension of the primordial decision.

1724

The Buddhist logic of the place of nothingness has something to do with the logic of the
sacred represented by the specialists of the sacred (world-renouncer). The sacrificial origins of
paradoxical logic of place or logic of nothingness in Kyoto schools philosophy could be traced
back to the violent sacred specialized by the world-renouncer as a world-constructing and
founding victim. The sacrificial dimension in Kyoto school philosophy becomes explicit in
their dangerous attempt to restore the mythical unity of religion and politics. It may not be
possible at all and may result in an unleashing of violence typical of totalitarian movements.
Here the fatal consequences of National Socialism should be a warning.
As in the case of the omphalos (the tombs of tragic heroes and the stone of the agora) in
Greece designating the very place where the surrogate victim perished,1725 the sacred place of
Buddhist world-renouncer has set up a new system of places, a new cutting out of space, the
creation of a new sacred geography centered on relics and stupa, and on living masters.
World-renouncer in Chan Buddhism were idealized men, masters whose power was manifest
in and through their (sacralized) relics. The place of world-renouncer set up a new sacred
topography, a new network of pilgrimage centered on sacred sites such as meditation caves and
stupa. According to Faure, the manipulation of sacred relics triggered a process of
sacralization.

1726

Nishitani and others described the state as the locus of absolute nothingness for the
individual.1727 This tendency of sacralizing the state could be understood aginst the background
of the ideological pillars of institutional Buddhism in medieval Japan, which described imperial
institutions as inseparable from the Buddhist establishment, and which effected a general
mandalization of state territories, as well as of numerous intellectual and productive
practices, thereby turning Japan into a veritable geopolitical maala.1728
The rise of the Chan patriarchs as foci of veneration contributed to the creation of a new
sacred geography. Another aspect of this phenomenon was the Tantric mandalization of
space, which integrated all the various places and deities of local traditions into the abstract
space of the maala. A similar logic presided to the reorganization of the imperial capital,
according to a model derived from traditional Buddhist cosmology. Another Buddhist model of
1724

Palaver, A Girardian Reading of Schmitt's Political Theology, 54-5.

Girard, Violence and the Sacred (New York/London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005), 322.
1726
Girard, Chan Insights and Oversights. An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition, 173.
1727
Kevin M. Doak, Nationalism as Dialectics: Ethnicity, Moralism, and the State in Early Twentieth-Century
Japan, in James W. Heisig and John C. Maraldo (ed), Rude Awakenings. Zen, the Kyto School, & the Question of
Nationalism, 186.
1728
Fabio Rambelli, Tantric Buddhism and Chinese Thought in East Asia, in David Gordon White (ed), Tantra in
Practice, 369.
1725

346

spatial/political organization was the Huayan conception of the universe as a hierarchized,

centralized, interpenetrating reality, with the Tathgata /emperor at its center.1729 The Huayan
philosophy played the role in the ideological revolution aimed at legitimizing the Empress
Wu at the turn of the eighth century. Great Buddha of Tdaiji, a figure taken from the
Avatasaka-stra, also played the symbolical role in the state ideology during the Nara
period.1730
Under the Tibetan empire of the late eighth and early ninth centuries, Mahvairocana, the
Dainichi-nyorai of Japanese Shingon Buddhism, appears to have become the central figure in a
new state cult. The emperor himself was in some sense homologous with the cosmic Buddha,
and that the ordering of the empire was therefore effectively equivalent to the generation of the
maala. The Tibetan imperial state itself came to be constituted, through a principle of
homology, as the body and maala of the Buddha Vairocana. 1731
The sacralizing logic of place also could be comprehended in the light of Buddhist divine
kingship (especially in Southeast Asia). In his book World Conqueror and World Renouncer. A
Study of Buddhism and Polity in Thailand against a historical Background, Tambiah has dealt
with the mandala as geopolitical concept, galatic polity, and cosmological topography in
southeast Asia, showing how cosmological symbolism pervaded political structure, architectural
layout, and court life. The Hindu or Buddhist cosmology of Mount Meru and the concentric
circles of continents and oceans informed the physical layout of capitals. Great architectural
monuments like Borobudur, Bayon and Angkor Wat have been called mandala. Most
interestingly, Kautilya in his Arthashastra used mandala to discuss the spatial configuration of
friendly and enemy states from the point of view of a particular kingdom. There is for Southeast
Asia a rich and extensive literature on the geometrical and topographical formulas(mandala)
usually fused with cosmological principles, which provided the design for the constitution of
communities that may range from clan or lineage-based segmentary societies.1732

4.5.

Logic of Soku-hi and Violent Undifferentiation

Like Suzukis work, Nishidas entire attempt to elaborate a logic of the East based on the
notion of contradictory identity, the so-called logic of sokuhi (is and is not), according to
Faure, is governed by Orientalist categories and reveals a nativist bias. Nishida was indebted
1729

Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights. An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition, 155.
Ibid., 60.
1731
Matthew T. Kapstein, The Tibetan Assimilation of Buddhism. Conversion, Contestation, and Memory (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2000), 60.
1732
Tambiah, World Conqueror and World Renouncer. A Study of Buddhism and Polity in Thailand against a
historical Background, 99-102.
1730

347

to Suzuki for his discovery of the logic of sokuhi in the Diamond Stra.1733 This Buddhist logic
of contradictory identity (logic of sokuhi) means the logic of the sacred represented by the
world-renouncing specialists of the sacred. Ichikawa Hakugen called attention to ethical
pitfalls not only in Nishidas actuality-ism but also in his logic of place and the notion of
absolutely contradictory self-identity (as well as in Suzukis logic of soku-hi). Among other
things, absolutely contradictory self-identity conveys the religious notion that by entering
directly into existential insecurity one is liberated from it, such that suffering is liberation even
while it remains suffering. But the socio-political application of this logic is problematic. To
Ichikawa, the logic of soku-hi, that is, the logic of the absolutely contradictory self-identity in
which non-freedom, just as it is, is freedom, in which [according to some] to become servant of
every situation (to sacrifice the self and serve the public in the holy war) is to become master
of every situation(as in Mahyna Zen), played the social and political role of promoting the
imperial system. At the social level the logics of place and soku-hi provide no basis for critical
evaluation of societies or for praxis aimed at transforming a society from what it is and what
it might or ought to be. With this overall character, Nishidas standpoint has been criticized
for not having offered little philosophical support for critical, autonomous responsibility. From
the standpoint of absolute objectivism, that is, the fact-ism of seeing the principle in the
particular thing, while Nishida in one respect negated the fact of the Greater East Asia Holy
War, he ultimately affirmed it and treated it in terms of the logic of from the imperial
household to the imperial household.

1734

The Buddhist notion of contradictory identity, the so-called logic of sokuhi (is and is
not) could be understood to represent a Dionysiac elimination of distinctions and a violent
undifferentiation. Buddhist violently undifferentiating Dionysian logic of soku-hi, that is, the
logic of the absolutely contradictory self-identity turns out to be a sacrificial logic of worldrenunciation that played the founding and differentiating role for the Buddhist imperial world
order. This Dionysian logic of the violent sacred specialized by yogic world-renouncer has
functioned as a traditional sacrificial and sacralizing logic rather than deconstructive logic,
resulting in an absolute objectivism, that is, the fact-ism and actuality-ism, and providing
no basis for critical evaluation of sacrificial societies. The sacred has its own logic, and that
logic is precisely that of the sacralizing expulsion
Socio-political application of this sacred and Dionysian logic that originally presents
yogic logic of forest world-renouncer turns out to be dangerous. Soku-hi (Japanese: )
means "is or is not". Logic of Soku-hi means A is A, and yet A is not A; therefore A is A. D. T.
Suzuki popularized this logic of soku-hi meaning is and at the same time is not as the core of
Mahayana thought. Nishida Kitaro, Tanabe Hajime, and Nishitani Keiji, the central
philosophers of the Kyoto school, grant the legitimacy of this dialectic without question, and
1733
1734

Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights. An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition, 84.
Ives, Ethical Pitfalls in Imperial Zen and Nishida Philosophy, 26-7.

348

invoke it often. For many ('Western') philosophers, however, the conjunction of A and not-A is a
contradiction, and the pervasiveness of the soku dialectic in their writings is puzzling, if not
absurd and meaningless. Western philosophers insist that 'A and yet not-A' is a contradiction,
while the Kyoto philosophers acknowledge the fact and maintain that the combination is
legitimate. The central philosophers of the Kyoto school accept contradiction and paradox as
essential elements in the explanation of (true) reality.1735
This contrdictory logic of soku-hi, it seems to me, signifies the violently sacred logic that
represents simulated reversal of values taking place at festivals and are specialized by worldrenouncing forest Buddhas and Bodhisattvas rather than the commonsensical logic of worldly
householder in village. What Buddhists strongly insist upon in their philosophy, according to
Suzuki, ist the merging of the two contradictory terms, distinction and non-distinction,
thinking and not-thinking, rationality and irrationality, etc. They tell us not to make any logical
thinking about the merging of opposities, for as far as formal logic goes, such merging is the
height of absurdity. To experience this truth of spiritual merging, for Suzuki, means to realize
the irrational rationality of non-discrimination, to perceive that two contradictory terms are
self-identitcal, that is, A is Not-A and Not-A is A. It is to become Prajna itself, where there is
no distinction between the subject and the object of intuition. It goes without saying that this
makes no sense on the rationale plane; yet it is imperative to have a penetrating insight into this
fundamental truth of absolute self-identity of opposities. This insight means the awakening of
Prajna, the attaining of Bodhi, or Enlightenment, becoming the Buddha, entering into
Nirvana.1736 To become the Buddha and to enter into Nirvana, it is imperative in his yogic
initiation to have and to represent the fundamental truth of absolute self-identity of opposities,
namely transgressive, nonsensical and irrational logic of violent undifferentiation.
Thus, the world-renouncers yogic process could be described as a process of violent
undifferentiation.

Buddhist world-renouncers

initiatory

and

yogic merging

(violent

undifferentiation in Girards words ) of opposites means the violent undifferentiation of

commonsensical and worldly logic. This violently sacred logic of absolute self-identity of
opposites represented by the world-renouncing Buddhas

could be interpreted as a kind of anti-

logic to the commonsensical worldly logic of Buddhist householder. This nonsensical and
absurd logic of violent sacred represented by forest world-renouncer could be traced back to the
Dionysian logic of world-renunciation meaning simulated reversal of values that takes place at
festivals.
Nishida introduces what he calls the dialectic of the soku-hi of the Prajnaparamita Sutra,
understood as the logic which can express paradox, and by extension, which can provide the
very logic of the question of the self-contradictions of the individual self's existential religious
1735

302.

1736

Nicholaos John Jones, The Logic of Soku in the Kyoto School, in Philosophy East and West 54/3 (2004),
Daisetz Teitaro Suzuki. The Essence of Buddhism (London: The Buddhist Society, 1983), 15-6.

349

consciousness. The Middle Path of the Chinese Three Treatise (san-lun) school, which was a
development of the Madhyamika (Middle Doctrine) school of Nagarjuna, taught a dialectical
logic known as "the Middle Path of Eightfold Negations, "through which the ultimate reality of
voidness was reached. This logic systematically denies all assertions regarding things in the
form of four double-negations: "neither birth nor extinction, neither annihilation nor
permanence, neither sameness nor difference, neither coming in nor going out." Nishida refers
to this logic in The Logic of Place and a Religious World-view, but it can be demonstrated that
he had been applying just this kind of thought-structure for many years to the notion of "the
topos of true Nothingness," which is the ground of the self that is neither logical subject nor
predicate, etc. This logic of emptiness of the Prajnaparamita Sutra can not be grasped through
Western logic. Even Buddhist scholars have in the past not clarified this logic of soku-hi.1737
This sacred and sacrificial logic of emptiness of the world-renouncing Buddhas can not be
grasped through Western logic and commonsensical logic. This kind of thought-structure should
be understood to mean the sacred world-renouncers negating thought-structure and logic in his
undifferentaiting negative way of world-renunciation. Thus the purely formal logical approach
to this forest logic cannot fully understand the self-contradictions and violent paradox
surrounding this absurd logic. Through the social anthropological concept-explication of the
Buddhist world-renouncing and self-negating logic, we have already interpreted this paradoxical,
non-aristotelian and nonsensical logic of nothingness, voidness and emptiness opposed to the
worldly and commonsensical logic of Buddhist householder against the background of the
forest Buddhas dharma and logic of world-renunciation. According to the Girardian reading of
contradiction and paradox around a dialectical logic of (world-renouncing) negations, this logic
of soku-hi, that is, the logic of the absolutely contradictory self-identity represents a logical
undifferentiation, or logical crisis. It could be described as a kind of Dionysiac elimination of
distinctions.1738
This violently undifferentiating logic of soku-hi originally represents the Dionysian logic of
world-renouncer as a representative of festive reversal of values. This world-renouncers logic
of soku-hi originally belonging to the sacred homelessness represents the violent undifferiantion
of logic and mimetic crisis of logic. This world-renouncing logic of paradox and contradiction
does not symbolize the commonsensical logic of worldly householder, but belongs to the
violently sacred world of forest and homelessness.
This paradoxical and illogical logic of soku-hi is concerned with the violent sacred
represented by the ambivalent world-renouncer. This logic is sacrificial. Therefore, a
decontextualizing application of this sacred logic into the socia-political context is not
unproblematic. For Ichikawa, one of the central problems in the approach of Nishida and Suzuki
1737

David A. Dilworth, Nishida's Final Essay: The Logic of Place and a Religious World-View, in Philosophy
East and West 20/ 4 (1970), 355-367. See 360-1 and footnote 17.
1738
Ren Girard, Violence and the Sacred, translated by Patrick Gregory (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1977), 127-37.

350

is the lack of a critical modern self. The doubt and negation that constitute the methodology of
philosophy were directed completely inwards, toward the self, and because of this the moment
for the maturation of the modern self, which is the subject of the modern critical spirit, was
obliterated. Ichikawa speaks of the obliteration of the modern self which could have been
expected to doubt, criticize, and resist the absolutism of the imperial system. With the
romantically emotional cluster of such concepts as absolute nothingness, [unique] historical
actualiy, no-self, the identity of contradiction, and destroying the self to serve the public, for
Ichikawa, many Japanese (Buddhist) spread the pollution of their no-self philosophy and
extended holy-war egoism throughout Asia.1739
On closer inspection, the allegedly postmodern and deconstructive logic of Buddhist
emptiness, nothingness and nonduality has proven to be premodern and sacrificial logic that
lacks the critical modern self. This premodern sacrificial logic of world-renouncing
nothingeness has played the founding, differentiating and even sacralizing role for the imperial
world order. The strongly premodern sacrificial implications of Buddhist concepts such as noself, absolute nothingness and the identity of contradictions should be noted.
This Buddhist logic of undifferentiation (logic of soku-hi) might be better understood if it is
placed against the backdrop of paradoxes and the contradictions surrounding the reconcilatory
victim (world-renouncer). From the Girardian viewpoint, we can postulate the sacrificial origins
of Buddhist logics and philosophy. Mckenna1740 has dealt with this sacrificial origins of
philosophy. Philosophy is an institution like many another; if the origin of culture and cultural
institutions is sacrificial, philosophy will not be immue to sacrificial mechanisms. Rather,
philosophy is accomplice to them when it thematizes the pharmakon while remaining silent
about the pharmakos (human scapegoat).1741
Buddhist Dionysian logic of undifferentiated (logic of soku-hi ) originated from ritual
nonduality of undifferentiated Buddha couples. For Girard, ritual, contrary to what Lvi-Strauss
believes, is an earlier effort to expel the evil mixture and make culture safe for differentiation.
Paradoxically, therefore, the Lvi-Straussian explulsion of the undifferentiated, just like the
Platonic expulsion of mimesis, pursues the same objective as ritual. Girard claims that the truth
of the expulsion is the essential taboo of human culture. Far from transgressing it, the secondgeneration explusion reinforces this taboo. 1742 Social anthropological tracing back of
Buddhist logics to the sacred world-renouncing Buddhas seeks to grasp this truth concerning
the expulsion of world-renouncer that is essential taboo of Buddhist culture.

1739
1740
1741
1742

Ives, Ethical Pitfalls in Imperial Zen and Nishida Philosophy, 27-8.

McKenna, Violence and Difference. Girard, Derrida, and Deconstruction, 28.
Ibid., 37.
Girard, "To Double Business Bound": Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology, 169.

351

2.6.World-renouncers Foundig Role for the World Order

Zen meditation lies at the root of Nishidas thought. The central philosophical theme of the
Kyto school ist the notion of absolute nothingness (zettai mu), rooted in the Mahyna Buddhist
doctrine of sunyt (nothingness) as the groundless ground of ontological nondifferentiation
and epistemological nondiscrimination. Absolute nothingness (zettai mu) is rooted in the
Mahyna doctrine of emptiness as the nondifferentiable and nonsubstantive ground of
reality. Absolute Nothingness is expressed by these philosophers of nothingness in the
critical, comparative light of Western existentialism and mysticism. Genuine emptiness or
nothingness remains the basis of all phenomena. Nishida shows that the logic of absolute
nothingness is not a simple oneness but the dialectical interplay of antithetical forces or the
self-identity of absolute contradiction.1743
This Buddhist notion of nothingness as the groundless ground and the basis of al phenomena
could be interpreted in terms of Girards insights into the role played by founding violence in
cultural order and disorder. Buddhist world-renouncers violent undifferentiating, Dionysian
and chaotic nonduality and emptiness has played the founding, differetiating and civilizing role
for the Buddhist world order. Paradoxically, sacred and sacralizing emptiness meaning the
chaotic, undifferentiatiated state of disorder became the civilizational matrix of world order.
At the origin of the social order is disorder, namely, the crisis of undifferentiation. There are
similarities between Schmitt and Girard in regard to chaos and order. One of these similarities is
their insight into the primacy of chaos and disorder. Buddhist primacy of chaotic nothingness
could be understood in the sense of the violent paradox of Buddhist culture based on the worldrenouncing, Dionysian and choatic nothingness. The founding mechanism of surrogate victim
governs the shift from cultural disorder and chaos to order. Girards seminal reflection on the
relation of order to disorder, being to non-being provides new insights into this Buddhist
nothingness and emptiness of world-renouncer as groundless ground of ontological
nondifferentiation and epistemological nondiscrimination (ontological and empistemological
undifferentiation in Girardian sense ). The founding mechanism transforms disorder into order.
Girard identifies mimetic violence as the source of both order and disorder. He stresses that a
founding violence overcame chaos in the beginning and thus created order out of chaos. Sacred
world-renunciation as a kind of anti-structual instituion and liminal world-renouncer as
representatives of festive reversals of values represent this (contained) choas and disorder.
Festivals re-create the primordial chaos. Thus, Buddhist dialectical interplay of antithetical
forces or the self-identity of absolute contradiction could be read in terms of Girards
1743

Steven Heine, "Postwar Issues in Japanese Buddhism," in Religious Issues and Interreligious Dialogues: An
Analysis and Sourcebook of Developments Since 1945, ed. Charles W. Fu and Gerhard Spiegler (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 1989), 246-52.

352

understanding of the two face of the sacred as the interplay of order and disorder, of difference
lost and retrieved.
In terms of

sacrificial logic rather than in the sense of apophatic theology, world-

renouncing nothingness and nonduality could be comprehended. Schpenhauers association of

Buddhist and Vedntic thought with the apophatic theology of Meister Eckhart has become a
recurring theme in Western representations of the Mystic East from the late nineteenth century
onwards and continues to this day. For King, probably the most influential example of the
association of Vednta with Christian mysticism is Rudolf Ottos Mysticism East and West
(1932), now generally acknowledged to be a classic work in the comparative study of mysticism.
Otto, in Kings view, avoids a simplistic perennialism that confutes the two thinkers, though
this is not surprising since his work is a clear attempt to establish the superiority of the German
mysticism of Eckhart over the Indian mysticism of akara. Ottos own liberal Lutheranism
prevented him from indulging either in statements of crass similarity between Eckhart and
Advaita, but it also furnished him with an opportunity to defend the intellectually rigorous
nature of akaras system against less sympathetic critics of Indian religion. This reflect what
King considers to be an important feature in the Western discovery of Vednta as the central
philosophy of the Hindus; namely, the projection of Christian theological debates and
concerns about the nature and status of Christian mysticism onto an Indian canvas. Ottos
critique of Advaita Vednta as detached, amoral and world-denying, in Kings estimation,
allows him to displace contemporary Christian debates about the status and implications of
Eckharts mystical theology onto an Indian screen. Towards the end of his study Otto places a
great deal of emphasis upon what he sees as the antinomian implications of akaras system.
Heavily influenced by German idealism (especially Kant and Schpenhauer) as well as
Romanticism, early Orientalists such as Max Mller and Paul Deussen tended to locate the
central core of Hindu thought in the Vedas, the Upaniads and the traditions of exegesis that
developed from them. For Deussen, an avid disciple of Schopenhauer, the Vednta philosophy
of akara represented the culmination of Hindu thought, providing evidence tht the idealisms
that were in vogue in nineteenth-century European thought were already present at the core of
the Hindu religion.1744 World-renouncers antinomian and transgressive nonduality represents
melting, dissolving and nonsensical undifferentiation of commonsensical dualistic-differentiated
cultural system.
The Buddhist-Christian dialogue attempted to return to the radically apophatic mystical
tradition, especially that of Meister Eckhart. But, to be sure, as Buddhist thinkers have been
quick to note, even Eckharts nothingness is not the absolute nothingness of Zen thought.
For Tracy, the Buddhist-Christian dialogue is the place where the full terror of otherness has
been most acute.1745 Absolute nothingness of (Zen) Buddhist thought can be explicated in terms
1744
1745

King, Orientalism and Religion. Postcolonial Theory, India and the Mystic East, 125-8.
David Tracy, Dialogue with the Other: The Inter-Religious Dialogue (Louvain: Peeters, 1990), 81, 88, 99.

353

of the sacrificial and world-renouncing nothingness of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. Thus despite
some similarities, it must be noted that there are the full terror of otherness between worldrenouncers sacrificial nothingness and Eckharts apophatic mystical nothingness. 1746
Nishida, Japans foremost thinker of the twentieth century, frequently invoked the Buddhist
tradition in his later years in order to illustrate his own philosophical position. He persisted in
the same endeavor, namely to formulate a systematic, non-dualist philosophy. The Diamond
Stra contains paradoxes and logical contradictions. Even though both Suzuki and Nishida
not only use the phrase the logic of sokuhi but also equate it with the self-identity of absolute
contradictories. Suzuki uses these terms to indicate a logical contradiction. Nishida does not
cite Buddhist ideas or texts to analyze, interpret, or apply them, but to illustrate his own
philosophy and to claim the Buddhist tradition as his heritage. His hermeneutical method is
selective and based on similarity by terminology, regardless of the historical or semiotic context.
The primary reason for this identification is the conceptual affinity and kinship he felt, albeit
without providing any argument in favor of it, between the fundamental paradigm of his later
philosophy and key concepts and slogans of Mahyna Buddhist non-dualism. As Kopf rightly
points out, he was not interested in the different metaphysical and soteriological motivations
and projects of the authors of the Diamond Stra, the Huayan commentaries, Wumenguan, and
the Linjilu were engaged in; rather, he felt that these philosophical schools provided a
terminology which, when applied independent from their original contexts and situations to his
own conceptual framework, expressed the paradigm which he found most foundational to his
philosophy.1747
As we have already seen, these logical contradictions and paradoxes consisting in Buddhist
logic of soku-hi and Mahyna Buddhist undifferentiating non-dualism might be viewed as a
kind of logical undifferentiation or a crisis of violent undifferentiation violating
commonsensical logic by Buddhist world-renouncer which is simulated for soteriological
purposes, namely for the purpose of world-renunciation. The originally world-renouncing
context of this soteriologically motivated logic has been often overlooked. Nishida understood
the ambiguous, or even paradoxical, nature of the Buddha-dharma, the non-duality to be the
symbol of human life. 1748
This seemingly purely formal logical ambiguities and paradoxes of Buddhist il-logical logic
has much to do with the very specific ambiguity and liminaltiy of sacred and Dionysian worldrenouncer. The forest world-renouncers very specific non-duality was decontextualized,
dehistoricized and universalized in the sense of the symbol of general human life. We need to
try to understand Buddhist nothingness not in an abstract, decontextualized fashion, but against
the background of world-renouncing Buddhas logic and viewpoints.
1746

Ibid.
Gereon Kopf, Critical Comments on Nishidas Use of Chinese Buddhism, in Journal of Chinese Philosophy
32/ 2 (2005), 313-26.
1748
Ibid., 324.
1747

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3.7.

Heraclitean Logos of Nothingness

Not only Carl Schmitts Nomos der Erde, but also Buddhist or world-renouncing logos of

nothingness could be elucidated from a Girardian viewpoint. It has been argued that Eastern or
Buddhist thought, like Greek thought, defined reality in this-worldly terms, but it lacked the
substantialist prejudice of the Greeks. Through its intervention, the historical world was to be
swept up in a sort of whirlwind as nature; not Aristotelian things or Cartesian cogitos, not
even Newtonian laws, but tumultuous processes of conflictual structuration operate over the
abyss of nothingness. To Nishida, Japanese modernity promised just such an up-to-date
vision. At the highest level, Nishida located something he called the place of absolute
nothingness, a philosophical concept derived from his earlier concept of pure experience and
retaining its Buddhist allusion.

1749

This Buddhist, or more exactly Buddhist world-renouncers abyss of nothingness could

be related to the sublime and terrifying abyss of the foundation, the magma of
undifferentiated crowds that all mythologies hide.1750 Through social anthropolical concept
explication of Buddhist (world-renouncing) nothingness and emptiness, we have already
interpreted this violently tumultuous processes of conflictual structuration operating over the
dark abyss of sacred nothingness of world-renouncer in the light

of Girards structuring

mechanism of reconcilatory victims. With the help of the social anthropoligical in-depth
definition of this desubstantializing, that is to say self-sacrificing and sacrificial nothigness in
the light of world-renouncers dharma and logic, we have known that this obscure place of
absolute nothigness originally represents a kind of sacrificial place of foundings victims
(samadhi as tomb).
The sacred place of obscure nothingness as a kind of tumultuously sweeping whirlwind is
reminiscent of the whirlwind of the mimetic crisis. These specific world-renouncers logic
symbolizies the anti-structural and Dionysian undifferentiation, namely mimetic crisis. Festive
excesses recreate the originary phase of violent and choatic undifferentiation from which order
was born. World-renouncer as a representative of this reversal of values during festivals
represents, in my view, choatic and Dionysian undifferentiation from which world order was
born and generated. Through a radically anthropological conceptual analysis or concept
specification of decontextualized and universalized Buddhist emptiness and nonduality in terms
of world-renouncers logic of renunciation, the strongly sacrificial roots of seemingly
postmodern and deconstructive Buddhist nothingness could be found.

1749
1750

Feenberg, The Problem of Modernity in the Philosophy of Nishida, 159-60.

Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benot Chantre, 177-8.

355

This stage, the place of absolute nothingness, is indeed difficult to understand without
reference to Buddhism. The place of absolute nothingness is the field (basho) on which self
and other deploy their identity and difference. That field is a scene of struggle understood in
traditional Buddhist rather than Western individualist terms.1751 This obscure Buddhist logic of
place is reminiscent of Heraclitean Logos. PreSocratic philosophers, particularly Heraclitus in
the 5th century B.C., recognized the dynamic, polar combat of opposites. War (polemos),
declares Heraclitus, is the father or source of all things and all human relations. He held, in other
words, that violence is the generative principle of both nature and the world of man. For Girard,
the logic of violence is linked with Heraclitus as the philosopher who first made the word
logos an essential philosophical term. The Heroclitean logos is the violence of the sacred, and
prevents doubles from destroying one another by the scapegoat mechanism.1752
Buddhist logos of nothingness and of nonduality-in-duality (avaitdvaita) also represents
the violence of the sacred, and signifies the chaotic and violent undifferentiation of logic.
Mimetic theory on the founding mechanism of surrogate victim offers an interpretive grid to
understand this tumultuous processes of conflictual structuration out of the chaotic and
undifferentiated abyss and place of nothingness. For Girard, Heraclitus, who has been called the
philosopher of tragedy and who has equal claim to the title philosopher of myth, seems to
have been on the track of the same structuring force Girard has pursuit. In the light of his
hypothesis on scapegoat mechanism, certain mute and indecipherable fragments of Heraclitus,
Girard says, suddenly assume an obvious meaning: Fragment 60 displays a clear summation of
the origins of myth, of the role of violence in the engendering of the gods and distinctions.1753
Heraclitus closely associates genesis and conflict, seeing combat as the father and king of
everything and locating violence at the very heart of morphogenetic processes. In the scapegoat
mechanism Girard discovered the deeper source of Heraclitus's famous fragment of a war that is
the father of all culture.1754 In Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, Girard
formulates two opposing logics, describing them as the logos of Heraclitus and the logos of
John, or the logos of violence and the logos of love. The Heraclitian logos is the sacrificial logos
of all cultures to the extent that they are founded upon unanimous violence on an innocent
victim. The logos of violence unites humans together around the reconcilatory victim,
preventing the loss of difference between humans from unleashing even greater violence. The
Johannine logos exposes the truth of the victim by being itself expelled.1755

1751

Feenberg, The Problem of Modernity in the Philosophy of Nishida, 163-4.

Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 266.
1753
Ren Girard, Violence and the Sacred (New York/London: Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005),
92-3.
1754
Ibid., 88.
1755
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 271.
1752

356

3.8.

World-Renouncers Rude Awakenings and Violent Sacred

The problematics discussed in Zen, the Kyto School, & the Question of Nationalism is

closely related with Rude Awakenings of violently undifferentiating and Dionysian worldrenouncer. The question of state-centered nationalism and fascism of the Zen Buddhist inspired
Kyoto School seems to be inextricably connected with the violent sacred represented by the
rude and Dionysian awakenings of forest Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. In his world-renoucing and
initiatory path to liberation, world-renouncer represents the mimetic crisis. Heraclitean logic of
Buddhist nothingness thus could be understood as the founding logos of all human cultures and
of violent sacred. In terms of sacred misconstruction of the reconcilatory victims foundational
and enduring role, Buddhist sacralizing idealization of chaotic nothingness and emptiness could
be explained. The surrogate victim becoms an organizing center.
In order to overcome the mimetic crisis of modernity, this return to the logics of violent
sacred has been made. The problem of modernity has been pointed out by these philsophers
of nothingness as follows: In the modern period the organic interrelation between three pillars
of human existence religion, science, and culture- is gone and these three pillars have fallen
into a state of constant conflict with one another. Nishitani sees this disintegration of the
foundations of the human spirit reflected in the political sphere, where the relationship between
the individual, the nation, and the world have deteriorated or broken down altogether. For
Nishitani, this style of modernity, with its twofold disintegration, came to dominate Japan as
well in the year after the Meiji Restoration. Nishitani argues for the need to lay new foundations
and to forge a new worldview. For overcoming modernity, the place() at which the
foundations could be laid for a new worldview and a new human being, must be located.
Nishitani pointed out the limitations and one-dimensionality of the idea of nation in traditional
liberalism, according to which the state is seen as a legal subject. From there he examines a
number of approaches, gradually building up a concrete understanding of the state as a living
entity that rises and falls in the ebb and flow of history.1756
This Kyoto schools philosophical attempts to return to the logic of violent sacred is not
unproblematic. Human beings, confronted with this situation of mimetic crisis, for Girard, tend
to be tempted to restore the lost effectiveness of the traditional remedy of surrogate victim
mechanism. However, it is impossible to rehabilitate a sacrificial mechanism in the process of
decomposition because growing awareness of these mechanisms is what decomposes them.
Girard argues that any effort to interrupt or reverse the process can only be made at the cost of
the knowledge being disseminated. This will always lead to an attempt to stifle this knowledge
by violence. There, Girard says, will be an unsuccessful attempt to close the human community
1756

Mori Tetsur, Nishitani Keiji and the Question of Nationalism, in James W. Heisig and John C. Maraldo (ed),
Rude Awakenings. Zen, the Kyto School, & the Question of Nationalism, 318-20.

357

in on itself. This sort of undertaking, Girard believes, characterizes all totalitarian movements
and the virulent ideologies that have succeeded and battled with one another throughout the
twentieh century. They are founded on a kind of monstrous but ineffective rationalization of
victimage mechanisms.

3.9.

1757

Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Hunger for the Mythological

By explicitly connecting blood and soil with the Japanese state, the Kyoto school

played a critical role in asserting a clear and unequivocal identification of nationalism with the
nation-state that some Japanese scholars have concluded that no group helped defend the state
more consistently and enthusiastically than did to defining the philosophic contours of Japanese
fascism. Nishida shows that the logic of absolute nothingness is not a simple oneness but the
dialectical interplay of antithetical forces or the self-identity of absolute contradiction.

1758

This Heraclitean logic of absolute nothingness as the dialectical interplay of antithetical

forces or the self-identity of absolute contradiction could be defined as a sort of the violence
of the sacred, which keeps doubles in relative harmony and prevents them from destroying one
another. For Girard, Heidegger was right in explicating the logos of Heraclitus as the generative
source of the world. Girard went on to say that Heidegger was right about the way in which the
world of culture and politics operates. Its main point is that Heidegger rightly distinguishes the
logos of Heraclitus and the logos of the Gospel of John, but Girard cannot accept Heideggers
attempt to validate the identification of violence (polemos) as the ultimate logos of the world.
Heidegger recognzies that the Greek Logos is inseparably linked with violence. Heidegger
defines the Heraclitean Logos as the violence of the sacred, which keeps doubles in relative
harmony and prevents them from destroying one another.1759
Nishitani seems to be most influenced by the later writings of Nietsche and Heidegger.
Nietzsches reevaluation of values was based on an affirmation of creative nihilism, a
Dionysian yea-saying to the bottomless ground of reality.1760 For Nishitani, ironically, it was
not in his nihilistic view of Buddhism but in such ideas as amor fati and the Dionysian as the
overcoming of nihilism that Nietzsche came closest to Buddhism.1761
But this Dionysian yea-saying of the violent sacred turns out to be strongly sacrificial and
violent. For Girard, Nietzches aphorism affirms the eternal return, but it reveals the engine of
1757

Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 129.

Heine, "Postwar Issues in Japanese Buddhism," 252.
1759
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 265-6.
1760
Heine, "Postwar Issues in Japanese Buddhism," 256-7.
1761
Nishitani Keiji, The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism, translated by Graham Parkes with Setsuko Aihara (New York:
State University of New York, 1990), 180.
1758

358

that return: the collective murder of arbitrary victims. Girard argues that Nietzsches entire
tragedy is to have seen but to have not wished to understand the undermining of sacrificial
mechanism performed by the Bible. Nietzsche tried to reinvest it with meaning by betting on
Dionysus. Seeking to imitate Dionysus, to become a Dionysiac philosopher, Nietzsche was
totally involved in what was supposed to be the creation of values, a re-invented aristocracy
which was in reality the abyss of a will to power.1762 But, the primordial expression of the
mythic cult, Girard says, is sacrificial lynching, the Dionysian dismemberment of the
victim.1763
In all probability Nishitani has immersed himself in studies of the dark nature of Schelling
and the nihilism of Nietzsche. He had a good insight into the psychology of what was going on
all about him, in particular the disenchantment with pure reason among anti-rationalistic
movements and what he called their hunger for the mythological.1764 For Girard, Schelling
had splendid intuitions about mythology. And Nietzsche as well. However, Girard argues, they
did not see, or did not want to see, that the Passion of Christ had completely transformed the
sacred. This is the meaning of aphorism 125 of The Gay Science. Romanticism got a glimpse
of the abyss of the foundation, the magma of undifferentiated crowds that all mythologies
hide. It is thus both sublime and terrifying.1765
Nishitani uses his philosophy of religion for the promotion and justification of a totalitarian
usurpation of the individual by the state of a total sacrifice of the individual to the state.1766 This
hunger for the mythological might lead to dangerous results as in the case of Nietzsche. For
Girard, Nietzsche succumbed to the unbearable tension that he wanted to maintain between
Dionysius and the Crucified. Girard maintains that whatever its origins, Nietzsches madness
certainly derives from the constant, increasingly accelerated switching from the Crucified to
Dionysius and from archaic religion to Christianity. Nietzsche did not want to see that Christ has
taken Dionysiuss place once and for all; that he had both appropriated and transformed the
Greek heritage. Nietzsche thus allows himself to be swallowed up in violences fight to the
death with truth.1767
Nietzsches aphorism about Dionysus against the Crucified is followed two pages later
by: Buddha against the Crucified. Influenced by Nietsche, current (French) philosphy has
given a central role to the Dionysian. For example, Georges Bataille consider Dionysus as the
god of transgression and celebration, ecstasy and madness, eroticism and dissipation. Michel
Foucault, the author of the preface to Batailles Oeuvres completes, points to the congeniality

1762

Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benot Chantre, 96, 101.
Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 117.
1764
Tetsur, Nishitani Keiji and the Question of Nationalism, 323.
1765
Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benot Chantre, 177-8.
1766
Ruth Kambartel, Religion als Hilfsmittel fr die Rechtfertigung einer totalitren Staatsideologie in Nishitani
Keijis Sekaikan to kokkakan, in Japanstudien I (1989), 72.
1767
Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benot Chantre, 125.
1763

359

between Batailles concept of transgression and Heideggers concept of transcendence or

between the heterology and the thought of difference. Also for Heidegger the sacred is primarily
something disturbing and appalling. What Heidegger states about sacrifice, is indeed
congenial to Batailles views. The openness to being, in its distinction from concrete beings, can
take shape in sacrifice. Sacrifice is the place where Being itself can appear and Dionysis is
preeminently the god who embodies this appearance. For Girard, Dionysus is not at all the
embodiment of the merry carelessness, but on the contrary, the archetype of furious violence
and of chaos. For Girard, Heidegger is, in line of Nietzsche, not only the thinker who unmasks
violence in its sacred dimension, but worships it as well.1768
Choosing for Dionysus against the Crucified implies a return to sacral violence. This return
of violence, Girard claims, can already be discerned in the work of Nietzsche himself. Buddhist
tragic depiction of ontologically empty world-renouncers nothingness and the role and function
of the Dionysian in Buddhist texts could be read by the interpretive work of Girard, who has
noted the special relationship Euripidean and Sophoclean tragedy share with the concepts of
violence and the sacred. From the viewpoint of sacrificial mechanism polarized around the
Buddhist tragic hero, world-renouncer, Dionysian yea-saying to the Heraclitean nothingness of
the Buddhist violent sacred could be explained. Girard contends that in order to understand
Heidegger better, we must read him within the radical anthropological perspective enabled
by the revelation of the victimage mechanism. For Girard, neither Heidegger nor any of his
successors has been willing to trace philsophy back beyond the pre-Socratics into the territory
of religion, where philsophy had not yet begun.1769
In defining the Johannine logos in terms of the victim, Girard argues that any real difference
between the Greek Logos and the Christian Logos will have something to do with the qeustion
of violence. The Gospel of John states that God is love, and the synoptic Gospels make clear
that God treats all warring brothers with an equal measure of benevolence. In fact, it is the
Greeks and their spiritual descendants who, als lovers of theatre, greet the trumpets with
applause. The Jews had no theatre, says Girard. Once the mechanism of the scapegoat is
detected, the singular nature of the Johannine Logos becomes quite clear, and it can easily be
differentiated from the Heraclitean Logos. Cultures are based on the Heraclitean Logos, the
Logos of expulsion, the Logos of violence, which, if it is not recognized, can provide the
foundation of a culture. The Johannine Logos discloses the truth of violence by having itself
expelled. Johns prologue undoubtedly refers to the role of expulsion in the definition of the
Johanninie Logos.1770
In terms of the logic of the sacred described by Girard, Buddhist logos of choatic and
Dionysian nothingness can be explained. Heraclitean logos of dark nothigness was used for a
1768
1769
1770

Guy Vanheeswijck, The Place of Ren Girard in Contemporary Philosophy, in Contagion 10 (2003), 103-4.
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 268.
Ibid., 268-71.

360

thinly disguised glorification of war and the philosophical underpinnings for Japanese
fascism. 1771 The idea of a national no-self is basic to Nishitanis thought. He refers
apparently to the imperial family as the kind of transcendent center and as an unmovable
center that runs through the history of the country. 1772 Nishida also supported Japanese
hegemony in Asia and he was an enthusiastic advocate of the emperor system. Indeed, for
Nishida the imperial house lay at the center of both the political and cultural systems. As such,
he called it the identity of contradictions, situating it mysteriously beyond the reach of his
own concept of action as a system of reciprocities. For Feenberg, this would seem to absolutize
the state as an expression of the emperors will; only the sustained ambiguity of politics and
culture in Nishidas thought distances it somewhat from the crude statist nationalism of the
day by signifying that will as a place (basho) of nothingness without particular content.1773
(Buddhist) chaotic and violently undifferentiated place (basho) of nothingness that
absolutizes and sacralizes the imperial state can be described as a place of the violent sacred and
a place of the founding victim. The burial place of Oedipus at Colonus becomes the sacred
protector of that city. Girards hypothesis is that most rituals and festivals hide within their
structure the memory of a remote sacrificial crisis that dissolves distinctions, a crisis signaled by
the ecstatic festival of the Bacchae. Japanese imperial house as a place (basho) of nothingness
and a kind of transcendent und unmovable center also can be described as a place of violent
sacred and of the founding victim. According to a Japanese anthropologist, Masao Yamaguchi
cited by Girard, the Japanese imperial house can be understood in the light of surrogate victim
mechanism. Yamaguchi has gathered the principal Japanese ritual institutions such as the
emperor, the geishas, the theatre, the marionettes, etc., under the heading of what he calls the
scapegoat.1774
One of the most important among Japanese dualistic principles are those of uchi and soto
(inside and outside, home and not home). Such distinctions between contexts or forces defined
according to different principles of the dualistic universe are, especially according to
conceptions of purity and pollution, closely related to distinctions between insiders and
outsiders the relations between whom have also to be bridged. Among the social implications
of this conception is also the possibility of its being used as a rationale for discrimination. In
transitions, especially from situations of pollutions to purity, ritual is of very great importance,
as are also many mediatory figures which play a crucial role in the Japanese universe. It is such
mediating figures pertaining to different rituals of purification. Mediating figures range from
the highest to the lowest insiders and outsiders in any natural and/or social context. Many
figures such as for instance the monkey may perform such mediating functions as deities,
1771

Horio Tsutomu, The Chkron Discussions, Their Background and Meaning, in James W. Heisig and John C.
Maraldo (ed), Rude Awakenings. Zen, the Kyto School, & the Question of Nationalism, 289.
1772
Tetsur, Nishitani Keiji and the Question of Nationalism, 325.
1773
Feenberg, The Problem of Modernity in the Philosophy of Nishida, 168.
1774
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 131-3.

361

ritual scapegoats, clowns and the like. The potentially redemptive qualities of such marginal
elements have also been articulated in the development of certain traditional forms of theatre,
especially the Kabuki, and even, as Masao Yamaguchi has shown, in the conception of the
Imperial house as it developed under the Tokugawa and was portrayed in many Kabuki plays.
The place of the Emperor within this mediatory universe is one of the most significant features
of the Japanese cosmology. The emperor was referred to in ancient Japan as divine messengers
sacred body.1775
The strong mythological and sacrificial roots and implications consisting in the Zen
Buddhism-inspired religious philosophy of Kyoto school could be analyzed in these sacralizing
logic: imperial house or emperors will as a dark center, identity of contradictions and a place
(basho) of nothingness without particular content. This Buddhist logic are reminiscent of
Heraclitean logos.

4. Kenotic God, Differentiating nyat and the Victim

3.1.

Kenotic God and Sacrificial nyat

The framework established by Nishidas (and Suzukis) logic of contradictory identity and
its use of Oriental Nothingness() as an ideological weapon, so Faure argues, paved the
way for the kind of the theological/philosophical confrontation of East and West that has
occupied much of the philosophical activity of the postwar Kyto school and resulted in a
rather sterile dialogue between Zen and Western philosophy, or Zen and Christianity. For
Faure,1776 a recent example of the Kyto schools monological dialogue can be found in
Abe Masaos Zen and Western Thought (1985). In another essay Kenotic God and Dynamic
nyat, Masao Abe, a Zen practitioner and philosopher of the Kyoto School, created a
dialogue with Christians. It is not that the Son of God, Abe argues, became a person through
the process of his self-emptying but that fundamentally he is true person and true God at one
and the same time in his dynamic work and activity of self-emptying. Abe asserts that we
must consider not only the self-emptying of the Son of God but the kenosis of the very God,
without which the kenosis of the Son is inconceivable. Without the emptying of God Himself,
there are still traces of dualism, a dualism of God and the other, the infinite and the finite. If
Christianity can read the concept of kenosis this way, then a common ground with Buddhism is
opened up, and Christianity can share with Buddhism the realization of absolute nothingness as
1775

S. M. Eisenstadt, The Japanese Attitude to Nature: A Framework of Basic Ontological Conceptions, in Ole
Bruun and Arne Kalland (eds), Asian Perceptions of Nature: A Criticial Approach (Nordic Institute of Asian Studies,
1995), 195-7.
1776
Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights. An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition, 85.

362

the essential basis for the ultimate.1777 According to Abes interpretation of the Christian
notion of Kenosis, Kenosis supposedly coincides with the Buddhist notion of nyat, through
which Abe attempts to build an interreligious bridge.
Maso Abes basic formula, Self is not self, therefore it is self, is an example of the socalled logic of soku-hi is and at the same time is not that Suzuki popularized as the core of
Mahyna thought. 1778 This logic finds its locus classicus in the Chinese version of the
Diamond Stra. Probably no one has employed the soku-hi formula more widely than Abe, who
uses it even to suggest to Christian theologians the true meaning of Gods incarnation in
Christ.1779 Abes appeal to the traditional formula to explain a central doctrine of another
religion accentuates commitment to the superiority of his Buddhist logic.

1780

According to Abe (in his book The Emptying God: A Buddhist-Jewish-Christian

Conversation), the Son of God is not the Son of God (for he is essentially and fundamentally
self-emptying); precisely because he is not the Son of God, he is truly the Son of God (for he
originally and always works as Christ, the messiah, in his salvational function of selfemptying. Self is not self (for the old self must be crucified with Christ),

precisely because it

is not self. Itt is truly self (for the new self resurrects with Christ). God is not God (for God is
love and completely self-emptying), precisely because God is not a self-affirmative God, God is
truly a God of love (for through complete self-abnegation God is totally identical with
everything including sinful humans).

1781

But Abes appeal to this traditionally Buddhist, more exactly sacred world-renouncers
anti-logical and Dionyisan logic of soku-hi to explain the meaning of Gods incarnation in
Christ seems to be problematic. This seemingly postmodern and holistic logic of Buddhist
nonduality conceals the strong sacrificial mechanism of founding victim. Violent, transgressive
or undifferentiating violation of the worldly-commonsensical logic by the forest worldrenouncer (especially in his initiatory path) should be interpreted in the light of the foundig
mechnism of reconcilatory victim.
But the kenotic Christ as the victim has revealed this concealed and mystified scpaegoat
mechanism. The rejected stone ist the scapegoat, who is Christ. By submitting to violence,
(kenotic) Christ reveals and uproots the structural matrix of all religion.1782 Leading Christian
and Jewish theologiansThomas J. J. Altizer, John B. Cobb, Schubert M. Ogden, Jrgen
1777

Masao Abe, Kenotic God and the Dynamic nyat, in The Emptying God: A Buddhist-Jewish-Christian
Conversation, ed. John B. Cobb and Christopher Ives (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1990), 3-64.
1778
One of Suzukis English forumations of this logic of praj -intuition is: A is not A and therefore A is A. A is
A because it is non-A. Cf. D. T. Suzuki, Studies in Zen (New York: Delta, 1955), 119-20.
1779
John B. Cobb, Jr. and Christopher Ives, eds., The Emptying God: A Buddhist-Jewish-Christian Conversation
(Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1990), 12, 16.
1780
John C. Maraldo, Questioning Nationalism Now and Then: A Critical Approach to Zen and the Kyoto School,
in James W. Heisig and John C. Maraldo(ed), Rude Awakenings. Zen, the Kyto School, & the Question of Nationalism,
342-3.
1781
Cobb and Ives, eds., The Emptying God: A Buddhist-Jewish-Christian Conversation, 12, 16.
1782
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 178-9.

363

Moltmann, and David Tracy and so on reply to Abe's proposals for considering God to be
intrinsically self-emptying. However, the the majority of Christian (and even Jewish)
theologicans remain unpersuaded. Hans Kng, for example, complains that Abe takes the notion
of kenosis out of context, that the idea of God the Father completely emptying Himself is
unbiblical. John Hick says: The idea of divine self-emptying is, I think, a poetic or a
metaphorical idea. It is extremely vagueIf we say that God empties himself are we saying that
God ceases to exist ? That he commits suicide ?...I just find the phrase divine self-emptying
dangerously vague. David Tracy, too, opposes Abe in this regard, stating, I am not persuaded
that Abes interpretation of the Christian belief in God is the way for Christiansto think about
God(H)e has not understood the intrinsically dynamic, self-manifesting, and dialectical
character of any good Christian Trinitarian understanding of God What is needed, Tracy
suggests, is careful comparative analysis of the Buddhist dialectic of non-duality and the
distinct Christian dialectic of identity-in-difference. These are clearly not the same dialectics
which is why I cannot accept Abes reading of the kenotic God.1783
There are essential and radical differences as well as some structural similarities between
Buddhist sacrificial nothingness (nyat) and demystifying kenosis of Christ. More radical and
careful comparative analysis of the Buddhist sacred dialectic of non-duality or violent
undifferentiation and the distinct Christian trinitarian dialectic of identity-in-difference is
needed. Buddhist dialectic of non-duality should be understood against the generative
background of Dionysian dialectic of world-renunciation and of violently undifferentiating
world-renouncers logic. As earliert noted, sacred world-renouncers logic and dharma of
nonduality is transgressive and undifferentiating. Dionysian logic of nonduality represented by
world-renouncer is paradoxial nonduality yet problematic from the standpoint of morality.1784
Zens response to plurality, in Sharfs analysis, is a strategic retreat to the still point of
the turning world, which effaces alterity in the name of an experientially vibrant but
politically ominous nonduality. While this intellectualized Zen avers to leave things just as
they are, in fact it utterly emasculates the other, eliminating the possibility for real dialogue
or external critique. In the end, Zens response to plurality is a strategic retreat to the still
point of the turning world, which effaces alterity in the name of an experientially vibrant but
politically ominous nonduality. Sharf concur with Jan Van Bragts invocation of Emmanuel
Lvinas in this regard: this alleged integration [of self and Other] is cruelty and injustice.1785

1783

Masao Abe, Buddhism and Interfaithe Dialogue, Steven Heine (ed) (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press,
1995), 132, 217, 221. See also Cobb and Ives, eds., The Emptying God: A Buddhist-Jewish-Christian Conversation,
80, 119-22, 129-30, 135-54.
1784
Heine, Putting the Fox Back in the Wild Fox Kan: The Intersection of Philosophical and Popular Religious
Elements in the Chan/Zen Kan Tradition, 288-9.
1785
Jan van Bragt, Kyoto Philosophy Intrinsically Nationalist? 254. See Sharf, Whose Zen ? Zen Nationalism
Revisited, 50-1.

364

3.2.Violent Paradox of Dynamic nyat

Kyoto schools response to mimetic crisis of plurality in modern times was a dangerous
return or retreat to the still point of turning world, to the zero point of violently sacred
nothingness and sacrificial emptiness. Paradoxial nonduality yet problematic from the
standpoint of morality seems to mean the violent and Dionysian undifferentiation specialized by
the world-renouncing and transgressive Buddhas. When viewed within the context of worldrenouncers logic, violently dynamic nyat turns out to be violently sacrificial. Violent
paradox of dynamic nyat (nothingness), that is to say the founding and generative locus of
formless and undifferentiated nothigness has been already elucidated in the light of Girards
differentiating mechnism of the reconcilatory victim.
There are radical discontinuities and continuities between Kenotic God and Dynamic
nyat in terms of the surrogate victim mechanism. The fundamental discontinuity and
continuity between the apocalyptic kenosis of Christ and the sacrificial egolessness and
emptiness of world-renouncing Buddas could be postulated. For Girard, Christianity is a
founding murder in reverse, which illuminates what has to remain hidden to produce ritual,
sacrificial religions. Christ came to take the victims place. He placed himself at the heart of the
system to reveal its hidden workings. Mimetic theory does not seek to demonstrate that myth is
null, but to shed light on the fundamental discontinuity and continuity between the Passion of
Christ and archaic religion. According to Girard, Christs divinity which precedes the
crucifixion introduces a radical rupture with the archaic, but Christs resurrection is in
complete continuity with all forms of religion that preceded it. The way out of archaic religion
comes at this price.1786
The philsophers of nothingness understand both the need for a fundamental conversion
experience to realize nothingness, which he interpreted in terms of the traditional Zen notion of
the Great Death (or complete renunciation of ego), and the possibility of a radical
demythologization of Christian doctrine in the light of Buddhism to liberate Christianity from
yet to- itself. Because Zen demands continous demythologization by its own essence through
the Great Death, which is none other than existential rebirth to ones primordial nature or the
Formless Self of absolute nothingness.1787
Through the radical social anthropological concept explication and re-reading of the
Buddhist sacralized and sacralizing nothingness in the light of the mystified surrogate victim
mechanism, a more radical demythologization and deconstruction of Buddhist egolessness
could be made. We should eloborate on the anthropological reality underlying the Buddhist
1786
1787

Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benot Chantre, xv.

Heine, "Postwar Issues in Japanese Buddhism," 256.

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teaching of no-self, nothingness and voidness. World-renouncing and self-negating Buddhas,

Bodhisattvas and Buddhist saints played the role of founding victims for the world order
through the initiatory Great Death. In spite of seemingly continous self-demythologization
through the Great Death, the popularization of Chan/Zen and the growing importance of
funerary rituals probably, Faure1788argues, played an important role in the reenchantment or
remythologization of time and space that took place in Chan/Zen monasteries.
The apocalyptic knosis of Christ, the 'emptying' of God in the incarnation reveals the
connection between the sacred and violence. Christianity demystifies religion. Demystification,
which is good in the absolute, has proven bad in the relative, for we were not prepared to
shoulder its consequences, says Girard.1789 By accepting to be crucified, Christ brought to light
what had been hidden since the foundation of the world, in other words, the foundation itself,
the unanimous murder that appeared in broad daylight for the first time on the Cross. In order to
function, archaic religions need to hide their founding murder, which was being repeated
continually in ritual sacrifices, thereby protecting human societies from their own violence. By
revealing the founding murder, Christianity destroyed the ignorance and superstition that are
indispensable to such religions. According to Girard, it thus made possible an advance in
knowledge that was until then unimaginable.1790 Humans could not exist in the beginning
without sacrificial institutions that repress and moderate the kind of conflict that is inevitable
with the working of mimetic desire.
Girards mimetic hermeneutics provides an overarching interpretive framework for the
demythologization of Buddhist or more concretely world-renouncers standpoint of emptiness.
Violent paradox around the Buddhist standpoint of nothingness as the standpoint of the
groundless ground of all phenomena could be understood in the light of the Girards founding
mechanism. At the end of Nihilism, Nishitani quotes Ngrjuna: By virtue of emptiness
everything is able to arise, but without emptiness nothing whatsoever can arise.1791 Girardian
theory on the violently sacrificial origins of human culture sheds illuminating light on the
violent paradox of founding and differentiating Heraclitean emptiness of forest Buddhas. But
the philosophers of this violently sacred emptiness including Nishitani targeted liberal
democratic views of the nation-state and Eurocentric views of the world, and seemed to promote
Japanese expansionism.1792
For Girard, Christ revealed the truth of the violent foundation of all cultures. The refusal to
listen to this essential truth exposes us to the return of an archaic world that will no longer have
the face of Dionysus, as Nietzsche hoped. It will be a apocalytic world of total destruction.
Dionysiac chaos was a chaos that founded something. Girard asserts that we need courage to
1788
1789
1790
1791
1792

Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights. An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition, 193.
Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benot Chantre, x.
Ibid., xiii-xiv.
Graham Parkes and Setsuko Aihara, The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism (Albany: SUNY Press 1990), 180.
Maraldo, Questioning Nationalism Now and Then: A Critical Approach to Zen and the Kyoto School, 360-1.

366

admit the violent foundation of all cultures and to resist giving into the fascination of
violence.1793
Girardian understanding of the violent foundation of Buddhist cultures that are based on the
social anthropological explication of Buddhist nothingness in the sense of world-renouncers
dharma and logic, sought to explain this cultural paradox of founding emptiness and
nothingness as a groundless ground of all phenomena. Out of this Dionysiac chaos of
undifferentiating and obscure emptiness, Buddhist culture and world-oder are generated. This
founding paradox of differentiating Buddhas violently undifferentied and formless emptiness
could be understood through the absorption of all causality by the victim, which is so
complete that he becomes a dynamic symbol of supreme benevolence as well as supreme
malevolence, of social order as well as disorder.1794
The ideas of "nothingness" or "absolute nothingness," the fundamental basis for the religious
philosophy of many members of the so-called Kyoto school of philosophy, derive their origin
from the Buddhist notion of nyat. Nishida initially employed the world-renouncing ideas of
"nothingness" and "absolute nothingness" in his search for a logical basis for the development
of an "Eastern philosophy." Nishitani and Abe used these ideas as the solution to what they
consider the major philosophical problem of the twentieth century--nihilism--and view these
ideas as offering a solution that allows one to move from the "relative nothingness" of Nietzsche
to the "absolute nothingness" of nyat. By negating both the "non-Being" and the "Being" of
traditional Platonic philosophy, "absolute nothingness" thus results in an emptiness that is at the
same time an "absolute present" (Nishida), "creative nothingness" (Nishitani), or "positive
fullness" (Abe). As Ornatowski has rightly pointed out, these originally world-renouncing
teachings of nyat underwent a subtle development over time. The original meanings of
Buddhist nyat have existed within particular contexts of world-renunciation and, therefore,
lose their contents when extracted from these world-renouncing contexts. Translating these
overall meanings in their religious contexts into logical English terms and concepts is difficult
at best and often adds to the confusion in understanding properly. Given these difficulties, the
major translations of the term "nyat" have varied and have included such English
expressions as "emptiness," "nothingness," "nonsubstantiality," "relativity," and "voidness."
nyat has also been described as referring to a religious attitude or state of awareness; a focus
of meditation and a manner of ethical action. The greatest systematizer of these teachings on
"emptiness" was the monk and scholar Nagarjuna. Nagarjuna used argument of reductio ad
absurdum (prasanga) of all opposing theories that consists of convincing an opponent of the

1793

Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benot Chantre, 105.

Robert G. Hamerton-Kelly (ed), Violent Origins. Walter Burkert, Ren Girard, and Jonathan Z. Smith on Ritual
Killing and Cultural Formation, 92.

1794

367

falsehood of his own thesis without at the same time offering a counter-thesis.1795
This sacrificial (re-)reading of Buddhist emptiness and nothingness that are often
misunderstood as meaning postmodern and deconstructive seeks to reveal and unveil the
mystified mechanism of surrogate victim around the ontologically empty Buddhas. Compared
with this strongly sacricial emptiness of Buddhas, the kenosis of Christ must be understood to
demystify the process of the victim mechanism. The sacrificial interpretation of the kenotic
and demystifying Christs Passion, Girard claims, must be criticized and exposed as a most
enourmous and paradoxical misunderstanding and at the same time as something
necessary and as the most revealing indication of mankinds radical incapacity to
understand its own violence, even when that violence is conveyed in the most explicit
fashion.1796
Through the sacrificial rereading of world-renouncers nyat, we can see the mystified
and invisible violence of founding mechanism. As noted earlier, this Buddhist nyat was
originally the world-renouncing dharma and logic of Buddhist monks. The world-renouncing
meditation on voidness and nothingness is brought in not for its own sake, but as a
soteriological method which was primarily negative, that is, the negation of all viewpoints.
Meditation on nothingness is not taught to make a theory, but to get rid of theories altogether. In
Ch'an (Japan: Zen) Buddhism, the notion of nyat developed in further directions. These
included a greater emphasis on nyat as a focus of meditation and an attempt to reject logic
and the scriptural tradition completely. As Conze has rightly pointed out, Emptiness' has its true
connotations in the process of salvation, and it would be a mistake to regard it as a purely
intellectual concept, or to make it into a thing, and to give it an ontological meaning.1797
nyat should be understood within the soteriologicalprocess and context of worldrenouncers imposed logic and dharma of homelessness and egolessness. nyat was originally
violently sacrificial logic of world-renouncer. Therefore, the Kyoto-school philosophers' use of
an originally religious idea in a philosophical realm minus the soteriological or social
anthropological context of world-renunciation, is problematic. By giving the term "absolute
nothingness" an absolute and universal nature and making it a metaphysical equivalent of
"Being" in Western philosophy, their work runs counter to the soteriological, that is to say
world-renouncing intent of Buddhist use of the term nyat. In his use of the idea of "absolute
nothingness" as the center of his philosophy, Nishida encountered a certain problem. This was
that, by using a term that ultimately can be traced back to a certain interpretation of the Buddhist
idea of emptiness or nyat, Nishida, in his use of the idea of "absolute nothingness" as the
center of his philosophy, used a religious idea that defied analytical examination and could not
be neatly translated into noncontradictory philosophical concepts.1798
1795

Gregory K. Ornatowski, Transformations of Emptiness on the Idea of nyat and the Thought of Abe and the
Kyoto School of Philosophy, in Journal of Ecumenical Studies 34/1 (1997), 92-115.
1796
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 180-1.
1797
Edward Conze, Buddhist Thought in India (Ann Arbor, Ml: University of Michigan Press, 1967), 61.
1798
Ornatowski, Transformations of Emptiness on the Idea of nyat and the Thought of Abe and the Kyoto
School of Philosophy, 92-115.

368

Social anthropological re-reading of Buddhist nyat viewed in the light of mimetic theory
seeks to understand and explain Buddhist cultures violent paradox of dynamic, differentiating
and founding nyat. Radical discontinuity and continuity between Kenotic God and Dynamic
nyat of world-renouncing Buddhas could be explained in terms of paradoxical similarities
between the Christian gospels and myths, in which the immolated yet divinized scapegoat plays
the central role. For Girard, in fact, it is this similarity that has led to misinterpretation.
Rationalism has fallen into the trap by continuing to use the old reflexes of mythology: to
confuse Christianity with all the other religions is necessarily to make it a violent religion like
the others. Hlderlins help is needed, for Girard, to show the essential similarity and
difference between Christianity and archaic religion. Kenotic God is now on the side of the
scapegoat victim. He is, Girard says, outside of the system regulated by the play of sacred
difference, the difference that modern thought has postponed with unbelievable navet and
violence because of fear of identity.1799 Dynamic, but strongly sacrificial nyat of worldrenouncing Buddhas has to do with the violent transcendence generated by the surrogate
victim mechanism. For Girard, kenotic God broke away from the this violent transcendence of
the traditional religions.

3.3.

Kenosis, Weak Thought and Strong Sacrificial nyat

Formless emptiness may be considered to represent a formless and grotesque mixture of

things that are normally separate, that is to say a kind of Dionysiac state erasing all manner of
differences. 1800 Girardian theme of violent undifferentiation brings the new insights into
Buddhist formless and violently undifferentiated emptiness. In nyat, according fo Abe, form
is ceaselessly emptied, turning into formless emptiness, and formless emptiness is ceaselessly
emptied, and therefore forever freely taking form . For this reason the Prajnaparamita-sutra
emphasizes: Form is Emptiness and the very Emptiness is form. These statements, Abe argues,
are nothing but verbal expressions of the Buddhist ultimate Reality which may very well be
compared with dazzling darkness. This dark, chaotic and Dionysian formless emptiness of
sacred world-renouncer represents a ritual undifferentiation. Discussing Karl Rahners notion of
the self-emptying God and Jrgen Moltmanns notion of the crucified God, Abe goes on to
discuss Thomas J. J. Altizers notion of kenotic Christology from Buddhist point of view.
Altizer takes Nietzsches words, God is dead as the point of departure for his kenotic theology.
Altizer understands the death of God as signifying the act of kenosis whereby God fully
1799
1800

Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benot Chantre, 50.

Girard, Violence and the Sacred. 96, 160-1.

369

empties Himself into the world such that he pours out His total transcendence into total
immanence.

1801

Altizer has focused upon Mahayana Buddhist philosophy to reconstruct Christian theology.
For Altizer, Christian theology can be reborn only by way of an immersion in Buddhism,
perhaps no principle offers a deeper way into our lost epic and theological tradition than does
the Mahayana Buddhist dialectical identification of Nirvana and Samsara. 1802 We have
already interpreted this Buddhist dialectical identification of Nirvana and Samsara in terms of
violent undifferentiation specialized by the transgressive world-renouncer as the founding
victim. Despite this great appreciation of Mahayana Buddhism Altizer is highly critical of
certain aspects of Buddhism. His critique of Buddhism and Oriental mysticism is most clearly
articulated in the first chapter of his book, The Gospel of Christian Atheism, entitled The
Uniqueness of Christianity. He states: Whereas the prophetic faith of the Old Testament and
the primitive faith of Christianity were directed to a future and final end, and thus are
inseparable from a forward-moving and eschatological ground, the multiple forms and Oriental
mysticism revolve about a backward movement to the primordial totality, a process of cosmic
and historical involution wherein all things return to their pristine form.

1803

When compared with the eschatological, apocalyptic and demystifying Christianity, this
Buddhist backward movement to the primordial totality and a yogic process of cosmic
involution could be understood to mean a ritual simulation of violent undifferentiation. But this
formless,choatic undifferentiating emptiness are realized and simulated only for an awakened
one, that is to say only for the forst world-renouncer in his initiatory path of meditation. Those
who are unawakened have not yet realized this basic reality.1804
Inspired by his reading of the work of Girard, Gianni Vattimo also came to the conclusion
that Heideggers depiction of the history of Being as the weakening of strong structures is
nothing but the transcription of the Christian doctrine of the incarnation of the Son of God.1805
Vattimo agrees with Girards the twofold thesis that there is a close connection between
violence and the sacred on the one hand, and that Christs incarnation dismantles this violence
of the sacred on the other. Vattimo is able to introduce Girard into his nihilistic philosophy,
which is mainly inspired by Nietzsche and Heidegger, by identifying Girards violent God with
the God of metaphysics.1806
According to Vattimo, the incarnation implies the end of an almighty, absolute, eternal God
and thus the weakening of God. The God of Christianity is not the violent God of natural
religiosity. The weakening and dissolution of strong structures of which Heidegger spoke
1801
1802
1803
1804
1805
1806

Masao Abe, Buddhism and Interfaithe Dialogue, 147-53.

Thomas J. J. Altizer, History as Apocalypse (New York: State University of New York Press, 1985), 2.
Masao Abe, Buddhism and Interfaithe Dialogue, 153.
Masao Abe, Buddhism and Interfaithe Dialogue, 157.
Vattimo, Belief, 33-6.
Ibid., 37-9.

370

when he announced the end of metaphysics is linked to the event of the incarnation / which is
understood as the abasement of God and, in the line of Girard, as the dismantling of the natural
sacred. The relation between the end of metaphysics and the incarnation is, moreover, double.
On the one hand, it is the end of metaphysics which enables a rediscovery of the core of the
biblical message (the incarnation, Gods kenosis). On the other hand, the end of metaphysics is
the culminating point of the movement initiated by the incarnation, namely a movement of
continuing dissolution, absement, dismantling, weakening.1807
Vattimo follows Girards hypothesis that Christs death and resurrection eliminates the
violence of all sacrificial religion through its very unmasking. Christ shows that the sacred is
violence, and opens the way to a new human history that can be called secularized. Moreover,
the sacred is identical with the transcendence of natural religion. Vattimo also observes that
Nietzsches announcement of the death of God may well be interpreted as the death of the
moral-metaphysical God. The logic of nihilism coincides with the law of kenosis. By
elaborating the experience of the postmodern subject, Vattimo takes over the charitable
(peaceful) strategy announced in the kenosis of the logos by carrying secularization to its
conclusion.1808
But, as Depoortere has rightly argued, Vattimos proposal for a postmodern Christianity
raises many questions. We must examine whether Vattimo is not merely repeating God is
dead-theology. For Depoortere, Vattimo who defends nihilism and a nihilistic pluralism is
reduing the narrative particularity of the Bible to a vague and soft message on friendliness. This
postmodern Christianity with its Christian legitimization of secularization la Vattimo and
Altizer, however, does not seem able to cope with the current situation of ressentiment, global
capitalism and universal violence. Vattimo, according to Depoortere, is caught in the middle
between his nihilism (inspired by Nietzsche and Heidegger) and his profession of caritas as the
core of the Biblical message. Vattimo is too nihilistic, too influenced by Nietsche and
Heidegger, to be able to take the God of the Bible seriously.

1809

Thus, Buddhist formless emptiness and choatic nothingness can be understood to have
something to do with the Girardian theme of violent undifferentiation. For Girard, Shakespeare
makes fully explicit something that the myth suggests between the lines, the violent
undifferentiation before and behind the differential structure of scapegoating. 1810 Buddhist
world-renouncing logic of formless emptiness and dark nothingness also seem to suggest the
violent undifferetiation before and behind the differential struture of Buddhist world order.
Therefore, the radical difference between Buddhist texts reflecting misapprehensions of the
victimage principle around sacred Buddhas and the Judaeo-Christian scriptures, which bring
1807

Frederiek Depoortere, Christ in Postmodern Philosophy. Gianni Vattimo, Ren Girard, and Slavoj iek
(London/New York: T & T Clark, 2008), 10-2.
1808
Luca D Isanto, Introduction, 1-19, in Vattimo, Belief, 10-16.
1809
Depoortere, Christ in Postmodern Philosophy. Gianni Vattimo, Ren Girard, and Slavoj iek, 60-3.
1810
Ren Girard, A Theatre of Envy (London: Gracewing Publishing, 2000), 27.

371

these sacred misapprehensions to light, should not be neglected.

3.6.

Logic of Species and Immanent Transcendence

For van Bragt, the question does not limit itself to whether or not certain declarations by

the Kyoto philosophers made during a time of high crisis must be called nationalist or not, but
rather extends into a question about the nature of the Kyoto philosophy per se as a historical
endeavor. Compelled by academic honesty, van Bragt considers Kyoto philosophy with its
engaged philosophizing and existential philosophizing as intrinsically nationalistic.1811
And the idea of absolute nothingness, as van Bragt points out, is fraught with ambiguity from
the start. On the one hand, it is presented as transcending (Western) being and (Eastern)
nothingness. On the other, it is located in the Eastern tradition, most clearly in the form of
Buddhist emptiness, which sometimes merits it the name of Oriental nothingness().
It is on this point that Nishida has been accused of regionalism in his reasoning, of an
ambiguous mixture of metaphysical pronouncements and cultural-regional underpinning, and
an appeal to a privileged and unique experience, based on a special historical and geographical
standpoint.1812
In line with the shift from Judaeo-Christian myth to the Buddhist one, Tanabe speaks of
the nation of Japan as moving beyond the Judaeo-Christian idea of ethics incarnated in Jesus to
an Eastern ethic that sees the nation as the embodiment of nirmanakaya of the Buddha. The
Japanese state order was seen as a reflection of the Buddhist world order. Tanabes philosophy
of the state puts the nation in the place of Christ. Japan, for Tanabe, is the supreme archetype of
existence and that, as a union of objective spirit and absolute spirit, it manifests the absolute as a
Buddha-embodiment.1813 In this sense Kyoto philosophy, especially Tanabes philosophy of the
state, always stands perilously close to the sacralizing the state. According to van Bragt, as a
philosophical tradition it clearly situates itself within the ambit of Far Eastern Mahyna with
its immanent (and one must add, often ambivalent) transcendence. Van Bragt has rightly
pointed out the tendency visible in the works of the Kyoto philosophers and especially in
Tanabes later writings, to nudge the state in the direction of the Absolute whether as a
mediating force or as a concrete embodiment or conversely to see the Absolute as immanent
in the state. For van Bragt, these are examples of this conflation of the Absolute and the state
wherein the self-negation demanded by (religious) nothingness is conveniently aligned to the
self-negation that the totalitarian state demands of its citizens. Van Bragt draws attention to the
1811

Jan van Bragt, Kyoto Philosophy Intrinsically Nationalist ? 245-6.

Van Bragt, Kyoto Philosophy Intrinsically Nationalist ? 248.
1813
James W. Heisig, Tanabes Logic of the Specific and the Spirit of Nationalism, in James W. Heisig and John C.
Maraldo (ed), Rude Awakenings. Zen, the Kyto School, & the Question of Nationalism, 282.
1812

372

danger to which the idea of absolute nothingness or emptiness all too easily exposes the
individual subject. When emptiness is interpreted as an absolute totality, its absolute negation
can never return to an affirmation of the individual. In such a view, emptiness or absolute
nothingness condemns all multiplicity and otherness as inauthentic and finally disposable.
What we end up with is an ontological monism or totalism, which in turn readily leaves itself
open to the support of state absolutism.1814
This Buddhist emptiness that sacralizes the imperial state can be understood as from the
viewpoint of Girardian insights into the violent transcendence of traditional religions. It must be
noted that there are radical discontinuity and continuity between kenotic God and dynamic, but
violently sacrificial nyat. The radical or essential difference between demystifying Christs
kenosis and sacralized/sacralzing Buddhas nyat should not be overlooked.
Girards apocalyptic view of modernity can illuminate Kyoto schools these dangerous
attempts to overcome the modernity by moving beyond the Judaeo-Christian idea of ethics
incarnated in Jesus to an Eastern ethic that sees the nation as the embodiment of nirmanakaya of
the Buddha and sacralizes the world order.. According to Girard, freed of sacrificial
constraints, the human mind invented science, technology and all the best and worst of culture.
Western civilization, for Girard, is the most creative and powerful ever known, but also the
most fragile and threatened because it no longer has the safety rails of archaic religion. The
protective system of scapegoats is finally destroyed by the Crucifixion narratives as they
reveal Jesus innocence, and, little by little, that of all analogous victims. The process of
education away from violent sacrifice is thus underway, but it is going very slowly, making
advances that are almost always unconscious.1815
Japanese Critical Buddhism in Japan holds that hongaku thought based on the basis of a
nondualistic doctrine tends to foster a false sense of equality that mitigates the need for
social responsibility. This doctrine of original enlightenment and related doctrines such as
tathgatagarbha and Buddha-nature espouse an uncritical tolerance and syncretism that foster,
in the name of universal, nondiscriminating compassion, such problematic viewpoints as the
demand for societal harmony (wa ) over individuality and a tacit compliance with
militarism. These attitudes are in turn supported politically by totalitarian and nationalist
ideologies as well as intellectually by nihonjinron (Japanese-ism) rhetoric that ends
up abetting ethnic discrimination. The basic weakness of hongaku thought, according to the
Critical Buddhists, is that ontologically it does not allow for the existence of an Other, since all
things are considered to arise on from the single, undifferentiated primordial dhtu or locus,
and that it is thus rendered epistemologically and ethically incapable of dealing with the
complex manifestations of otherness that force concrete ethical choices. That is, the hongaku
and Buddha-nature doctrines lack a basis for developing situationally specific, ethically
1814
1815

Van Bragt, Kyoto Philosophy Intrinsically Nationalist ? 252.

Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benot Chantre, xiii-xiv.

373

evaluative judgements, and the result is an unreflective endorsement of the status quo. Zen, in
particular, has often hidden its support for the status quo behind what is, in effect, an elitist
aestheticism based on the notion that everything reflects the Buddha Dharma.

1816

Hongaku thought based on the basis of a nondualistic doctrine can be comprehended as a

Buddhist

thought

signifying

violent

undifferentiation.

Thanks

to

the

unanimous

misinterpretation of the founding murder, all things are considered to arise on from this
violently undifferentiated primordial dhtu or locus of choatic nonduality and emptiness. This
violently undifferentiated locus can be undestood to mean the the violently sacred locus of the
founding victim (world-renouncer) that is also the structural matrix of world order. As a kind of
sacrificial logic, this Buddhist thought does not allow for the existence of an Other and result in
an sacralization of status quo and world order.
Japanese Criticial Buddhist are in the midst of a very provocative rethinking of
Japanese Buddhism by some prominent Buddhist scholars and thinkers who claim that
Chan/Zen, the tathgata-garbha (seed, matrix, or womb of the Buddha) tradition,
hongaku shis (original or inherent enlightenment), and related ideas are not Buddhism.
This is tantamount to saying that most, if not all, of Japanese Buddhism is not Buddhist. The
idea of universal Buddhahood is said to be led eventually to hongaku shis a way of thinking
that came to include such ideas as the inherent enligtenment of all things; the identity of
samsara and nirvana; nondifferentiation of the indigenous kami and the Buddha and
Bodhisattvas; and the transcendence of all dualities, including good and evil and this ethos
grew to be pervasive und unquestioned in much of Japanese religious acitivity and thought. The
main focus of their attacks is the hongaku shis tradition (strictly speaking, the idea that all
things are inherently or originally enlightened) and the implications of this kind of thinking
(such as the idea of wa, harmony or conformity) that function as largely uncritical
assumptions in Japanese society at large. Building on the Mahayana idea of the identity of
samsara and nirvana, hongaku shis evolved into an ethos of absolute non-duality and total
affirmation of the mundane world.1817 Hongaku thought in the narrower sense refers to a
tendency within the Tendai school in medieval Japan characterized by the absolute
affirmation of the phenomenal world, and occasionally referred to as Tendai hongaku
thought.
Girards insights into the theme of violent undifferentiation helps to throw fresh light on
this Buddhist thought of hongaku shis (original or inherent enlightenment) that means the
identity of samsara and nirvana (violent undifferentation of Buddhist fundamental differences)
and transcendence of all dualities, including good and evil (transgression and undifferentiation
of all differences, including good and evil). Thanks to the sacralizing mechanism of the
1816

Steven Heine, Critical Buddhism(Hihan Bukky) and the Debate Concerning the 75-fascicle and 12-fascicle
Shbgenz Texts, in Japanese Journal of Religious Studies 21/1 (1994), 40-2.
1817
Paul L. Swanson, Why They Say Zen Is Not Buddhism. Recent Japanese Critiques of Budha-Nature, in Jamie
Hubbard and Paul Swanson, eds., Pruning the Bodhi Tree: The Storm over Critical Buddhism, 6.

374

founding victim, this violently undifferentiating thought of Buddhist world-renouncer has

resulted in total and absolute affirmation and sacralization of the Buddhist world order.
Tendai and Shingon is two most important mainstream forms of Japanese Tantra that are
widely considered to constitute mikky, the esoteric Buddhism or pure esotericism of Japan.
In spite of the historical presence, within their own traditions, of these elements of Indo-Tibetan
Tantric practice, Shingon and Tendai apologists, as White has indicated, have for centuries tried
to distance themselves from if not deny the eixstence of the darker magical (and in particular
sexual) components of Tachikawa-ry and other Tantric heresies. The refined (righthanded) philosophical speculation grew out of preexisting (left-handed) Tantric practices.
Buddhist philosophical logic grew out of the world-renouncing and undifferentiating Buddhist
ritual. Buddhist doctrine of identity in difference, or the identity of sasra and nirv
a grew
out of preexisting tantric and Dionysian ritual. (Undifferentiating) transactions in and the
consumption of sexual fluids, as White put it, served as means for affirming the doctrine of
identity in difference, or the identity of sasra and nirva, in Hindu and Buddhist Tantra. The
Siddhas and crazy yogis of Vajrayna tradition are legendary for having resorted to
alimentary and sexual transgression as means of teaching the identity of sasra and
nirvna.1818
Although Japanese Buddhism is probably best known in popular circles for its rich
tradition of Zen teachings and practices, from a historical perspective it, for Gardiner, is
plausible to contend that no form has had more of a pervasive impact on the overall
development of Japanese religion than the esoteric or Tantric Buddhist schools known in Japan
as mikky (secret teaching).1819 As with all antinomian teachings, Buddhism lent itself
easily to a justification of worldly desires. For example, the theory of innate awakening(J.
hongaku shis) was one of the main theoretical justification for the changes. Antimonianism
was central to Chan and in perfect harmony with the sudden teaching.1820
This Buddhist paradoxical dialectic between absolute non-duality and unity (violent
undifferentiation of Buddhist fundamental difference, for example samsara and nirvana) and
absolute affirmation of world order could be best explained by mimetic theory on differentiating
mechanism of sacrificial victim. As noted earlier, Buddhist world-renouncers (violently
undifferentiated) identity of samsara and nirvana and (criminal) transcendence, or transgression
of all dualities, including good and evil, can be comprehended in the light of scapegoat
mechanism. World-renouncer as founding victim may be conceived as representing the absolute
undifferentiating non-duality and identity of samsara and nirvana. Through the paradoxical
dialectic of violent Buddhist sacred, this Dionysian absolute undifferentiation specialized by
world-renunciation results in absolute affirmation of world order. Through the world1818

White, Introduction. Tantra In Practice: Mapping a Tradition, 4, 16, 22.

David L. Gardiner, The Consecration of the Monastic Compound at Mount Koya by Kkai, in David Gordon
White (ed), Tantra in Practice, 119.
1820
Faure, The Rhetoric of Immediacy. A Cultural Critique of Chan/Zen Buddhism, 232.
1819

375

renouncing surrogate victims transgressive crime of violent undifferentiation, difference are

(re-)differenciated,

(re-)generated and reproduced and world order are affirmed.

The Buddhist theory of non-discrimination found in the medieval Tendai tradition of

hongaku (original enlightenment) seems to represent the founding victims transgressive
theory of violent undifferentiation. Rygen, the Deified Devil King and protective Devil
King was later regarded as the founder of hongaku thought. Girardian mimetic theory on the
mechanism of reconcilatory victim can shed new light into the seemingly opposite images of a
demonic figure and a high-ranking priest, both of which were, and are still today, worshipped as
the great patriarch and ma-conquering Rygen. Rygen, the founding victim in Girardian sense,
is acclaimed as the symbol of this principle of (transgressive) nondiscrimination between
delusion and enlightenment. Both positive and critical images of Rygen drew from notions of
ma (Skt. mara), or the Buddhist concept of delusion/devil. The most striking aspect of the
images of Rygen is his association with ma. The Buddhist term ma, or mara, originally meant
death or destruction. Delusion or temptation may be termed ma. Such equations made it
possible to put Rygen in the same category as onyr, under the title Ma, and to regard him as
a powerful negative force who could bring chaos to the secular world. The evolution of
Rygens ma-related image does not end here. By the late Kamakura and early Muromachi
periods he came to to worshiped as Ma, the Devil King. Hongaku theory of radical nondiscrimination, or the identity (ichinyo) of opposites, in particular, helps, for Wakabayashi,
account for the emergence of the notion of a protective Devil King. According to this theory,
good and evil, life and death, delusion and enlightenment are one and the same. Evil (or death or
delusion) may thus be affirmed as something no different from its counterpart, good(or life or
enlightenment). Mara and Buddha, too, are one and the same, as seen in the expression mabutsu
ichinyo (the onesuchness of Mara and the Buddha).1821

3.7.

World-Renunciation as Contained Chaos for the World Order

Through mimetic reading of choatic world-renunciation as a "safety valve" 1822 and

"contained chaos"1823 for the world order, we have already paid attention to the sacrificial
origins of world-renouncing nyat (nothingness) and decoded the hidden and mystified
protective system of scapegoats around the this obscure, dark, Dionysian and Heraclitean places
and logics of (absolute) nothingness represented by the world-renouncing Buddhas. As a sacred
1821

Haruko Wakabayashi, From Conqueror of Evil to Devil King. Rygen and Notions of Ma in Medieval Japanese
Buddhism, in Monumenta Nipponica 54: 4, 481-503.
1822
Louis Dumont, Homo Hierarchicus. The Caste System and Its Implications. Complete Revised English Edition
(Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1980), 279.
1823
Hardy, The Religious Culture of India. Power, Love and Wisdom, 553.

376

anti-structure and contained chaos representing the violent undifferentiation and mimetic crisis,
sacrificial nyat have played the role of dynamic locus for the protection of world order and
the state. It has been pointed out that Tanabes logic of species contains a comparable
ambiguity. Although ostensibly writing a general philosophy of the state, Tanabe had only the
current Japanese state in mind. In this way he conflated the ideal state and the actual state of
Japan. His reference to the ideal state as an avatar-existence of the Absolute or an absolute
relative in fact glorified the warring Japanese state of his own day.1824
In his paper Tanabes Logic of the Specific and the Spirit of Nationalism, James W.
Heisig has analyzed the sacrificial logic of the specific and logic of species that are comparable
with the Nazi ideal of the totalitarian state. In 1939, when Japans writers and intellectuals lost
the freedom of expression, Tanabe applied his logic of species to argue that the Japanese nation,
with the emperor at its head, has the status of a divine, salvific presence in the world. Marxist
as well as Christians, were quick to identify this new logic as cut from the same cloth as the
rhetoric of the ultra-nationalist government. In a 1942 book entitled State and Religion, Nanbara
Shigeru linked Tanabes logic of the species with the racism of the Nazis. It has been argued
that Tanabes ideas of Absolute Nothingness and absolute dialectic were marked by the attempt
to revitalize the historical content of Eastern culture on the basis of racial self-awareness.
Absolute nothingness is elevated to the status of a supreme faith, the source into which all
things flow back through the self-negation of the individual. Tanabe has attempte to twist the
dialectic of the Christian message of (kenotic) incarnation to the point that the Japanese nation
would be a mediator of salvation in the world order, thus reducing the idea of God to a logical
negation. Therefore it has been rightly pointed out that in such an Eastern pantheism, the race is
elevated even higher than it is in Nazism and Tanabes philosophy of the state with its logic of
species could be compared with the Nazi ideal of the totalitarian state. Umehara Takeshi offers
himself as a representative of those who felt themselves cheated by the philosophers at Kyoto
first herded off to war and then brought back to the pure heights of speculation as if nothing
had happened. For Heisig, the recondite and mystical philosophy of Nishitani, as difficult as
it was to understand, at least succeeded in communicating that the moral thing to do was to
sacrifice the self to the fascist state.1825
The dangerous attempts of Kyoto school to revitalize the traditional sacred specialized by
Buddhist world-renouner in his meditation on nothingness, resulted in the (re-)sacralization of
the state and in the absolute negation and sacrifice of the other and individual. With its (re)sacralzing logics of (absolute) nothingness, places and specific (of species, blood and soil), this
mystical or mystifying philosophy of Kyoto school has supported the immanent transcence of
state as in the case of Schmitts state-centered transcendence.1826 Through the dialectic and
1824
1825
1826

Van Bragt, Kyoto Philosophy Intrinsically Nationalist ? 247.

Heisig, Tanabes Logic of the Specific and the Spirit of Nationalism, 255-60.
Wolfgang Palaver, Schmitts Critique of Liberalism, in Telos 102 (Winter 1995), pp. 43-71. P.69.

377

paradox of violent sacred represented by Rude Awakenings of wild and forest world-renouncer,
the absolute nothingness (world-renouncing nyat) eliminating all affirmations transforms
itself dynamically and dialectically into the absolute affirmation of the imperial world order and
of the totalitarian state.
For Girard, christian revelation is the paradoxical victim of the knowledge that it
provides. Absurdly, it is conflated with myth, which it clearly is not, and doubly
misunderstood by both its enemies and partisans, who tend to confuse it with one of the archaic
religions that it demystifies. Yet, all demystification comes from Christianity.1827 In spite of the
formal similarities between Kenotic God and Dynamic nyat, the radical discontinuity
existing between them must not be overlooked. Violently sacrificial logic of absolute
nothingness as absolute totality condemning and eliminating multiplicity and otherness as
illusory ends up with an ontological monism, which in turn readily leaves itself open to the
support of state absolutism.1828
Kenotic Christs denunciation of sacrificial mechanisms constantly exacerbates violence.
The Others coming, Girard says, is in the process of destroying totality. This is the price of
eschatology. The (kenotic) Christ is the Other who is coming and who, in his very vulnerability,
arouses (apocalyptic) panic in the (sacrificial) system. In small archaic societies, the Other was
the stranger who brings disorder, and who always ends up as the scapegoat. In the Christian
world, it is Christ, the Son of God, who represents all the innocent victims.1829
In searching for the roots of lack of power to resist, van Bragt has paid attention to the
Mahyna character of Kyoto philosophy. Van Bragt asserts correctly that a clear concept of
transcendence made possible for the first time the de-absolutization of the tribe and the
emergence of the individual. But unfortunately by using the theory of decadence, he argues that
original Buddhism posited a clear transcendence in its idea of nirvana and that this clarity was
weakened in Mahyna by a stress on nirvana-sive-samsara. From the beginning of its
transmission to Japan, Buddhism was the Dharma for the protection of the state and Buddha
law and kings law were joined together and even identified in the Buddhism of Japan. The
refusal to identify the Absolute with anything this-worldly is therefore hard to find. 1830
Buddhist world-renunciation and world-renouncer as a representative of (violent) sacred have
played the dynamic, differentiating and founding role in protecting the world order and political
state (world-renunciation as safety valve). In this sense of violently founding nothingness, we
can speak of the dynamic nyat. Buddhist world-renunciation was the dharma for the
protection of the state and world order. World-renouncers dharma consists in all-negaging
illogical and anti-structural logic of nothingness for the preservation and protection of the world
order.
1827
1828
1829
1830

Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benot Chantre, xv.

Van Bragt, Kyoto Philosophy Intrinsically Nationalist ? 252.
Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benot Chantre, 105.
Van Bragt, Kyoto Philosophy Intrinsically Nationalist ? 251.

378

In his discussion about Absolute Nothingness and Human Rights, van Bragt points out the
defining mark of Kyoto philosophy that might also be construed as facilitating nationalism,
or at least as eroding the status of the individual within the state. Kitamori Kaz argues:
Absolute Nothingness makes it impossible to consider the contradictions of this world as
tragic contradicitions. It slants one in the direction of esthetic contemplation. The sweeping,
all-encompassing negation of absolute nothingness seems to take away all opposition, all
tension and evil. It seems to wide away every imperfection of actual human life by proclaiming
a higher standpoint from which all such things are seen to be non-existent or illusory. Therefore
the centuries-long history of the struggle for the rights of individuals within the state did not
taken seriously. The philosophers of nothingness were rather inclined to think of a direct
harmony (wa, ) between individual and state. As a result, they were also inclined to look
down on imported ideas of equality, individual freedom, and democracy, and the actual
struggles of real good against real evil. Nishitani says: We have to kill the self
absolutely,breaking through the field where self and other are discriminated from one another
and made relative to one another. The self itself returns to its own home-ground by killing every
other, and, consequently, killing itself.1831 Elsewhere Nishitani, according to van Bragt, vents
his negative feelings toward all the talk about human rights, stating that they seem to him only
to underline the will and power of the I. Van Bragt is right in emphasizing that true individuality
can be sustained only in a context where otherness is final and not reducible to any totality, be
it history, absolute nothingness, or (a pantheistic) God.1832
Nishidas ideal of harmony, for Faure, derived from the Kegon-Zen philosophy, and the
accompanying tendency to shun all conflict could all too easily have perverse effects. But
his theory eventually turns into an apology for the imperial system. As a solution to the conflict
between individualism and holism, Nishida suggested that, in the particular case of Japanse
history, which is centered on the imperial household, both the individual and the whole
mutually negate themselves for the emperor at a time when the individual was being
sacrificed on the altar of patriotism. According to Nishidas assertion of kokutai (national
polity) ideology, there is an essential identity between the divine realm of the kami, the divine
emperor, and Japan, the divine land (shinkoku).1833
For Girard, Christian revelation accelerated a trend to extremes by eliminating more
and more sacrifices. The Wests failing resides in its refusal to see the coming of Christianity as
a liberating maturity, an anti-sacrificial education.1834 By revitalizing and resacralzing the
traditional sacred (Buddhist nothingness), Kyoto school attempted to overcome the apocalyptic
crisis of modernity, that is to say the times of gradual disintegration of sacrifices effectiveness.
1831

Nishitani Keiji, Religion and Nothingness, trans. Jan Van Bragt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982),
263 (cited in Van Bragt, Kyoto Philosophy Intrinsically Nationalist ? 253).
1832
Van Bragt, Kyoto Philosophy Intrinsically Nationalist ? 252-4.
1833
Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights. An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition, 77.
1834
Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benot Chantre, 141.

379

Japans crisis and conflict in Asia was being fought on two fronts: an internal war directed
against many of the cultural innovations brought into Japan during the Civilization and
Enlightenment of the Meiji era, and an external war against the imperialism of the modern
West. Together these two challenges lent symbolic weight to the expression the overcoming of
modernity in wartime Japan.1835
The ethical dividedness, for Tsutomu, is the greatest malady of modern Europe. This
was considered to be the basic contradiction in the standpoint of modern democracy, with its
affirmation of the arbitary freedom of the individual as central. Tsutomu argues that a
subjectivity of non-ego, culminating in non-ego and no-self, extends beyond the selfawareness of the individual to set up a truly effective structure in the common workplace of
acting that diminishes ego.1836
Overcoming the sacrificial crisis of modernity and the so-called ethical dividedness as
greatest malady of modern Europe, philosophers of (violently sacred) nothingness attempted to
revitalize the Dionysian sacred originated from the Buddhist world-renuncing and antistructural nothingness. Religious and traditional socieities (cold societies in Lvi-Strauss's
sense) are based on a sacrificial framework that are capable of preventing the possibility of an
uncontrolled interplay of mimetic rivalry. In spite of hot, undifferentiated and apocalyptic crisis,
modern world, Girard argues, shows itself to be quite capable of absorbing high does of
undifferentiation. What would have acted as a deadly poison in other socieites, giving rise
to a crescendo of mimetic rivalry, can indeed produce terrifying convulsions within our own
society. But up to now, these have proven to be merely temporary. The modern world has not
only got over them; it has drawn from them new strength to flourish on an ever more modern
foundation.1837

V.

Deconstructing the Philosophy of Nothingness

3.

Post-structuralism, Buddhism and Girard

4.1.

Derrida, Girard and Paradoxes of the Buddhist Sacred

It is held by many japanese scholars that deconstruction is already a basic element in

Japanese thought, especially Zen Buddhism. It is often said that Buddhist thought or the Zen of
Dogen was already a kind of deconstruction. Some scholars have argued that the
1835

Horio Tsutomu, The Chkron Discussions, Their Background and Meaning, in James W. Heisig and John C.
Maraldo(ed), Rude Awakenings. Zen, the Kyto School, & the Question of Nationalism, 293.
1836
Ibid., 313-4.
1837
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 285.

380

nonsubstantialist and uncentered worldview of Mahayana Buddhism in general and acentric

Zen Buddhism in particular can best be interpreted through Derrida's postmodern vision of a
dislocated reality devoid of all fixed centers. It has been argued that Buddhist logic of nyat is
in fact a "differential logic" which is itself structurally isomorphic with Derrida's logic of
diffrance and that Nagarjuna's nyat is Derrida's diffrance. The diffrance of Derrida, like
the nyat of Buddhism, represents a critical deconstruction of the principle of "self-identity",
i.e., what in Buddhist discourse takes the form of deconstituting all substantialist modes of
own-being or self-existence (svabhaava). Through deconstructive analysis all metaphysical
centers understood as a mode of absolute self-identity are disseminated into a network of
differential relationships in which there are no positive entities. It has been also asserted that the
differential Buddhism of Nagarjuna with its radical deconstruction of all fixed metaphysical
centers reaches its culmination in the tradition of East Asian Zen (Chinese: Ch'an)
Buddhism.1838
But Buddhis logic of nyat can be interpreted through Girards theory on the founding
mechanism of surrogate victim in the sense of violently differentiating logic for the world order.
nyat of Buddhism represents a sacrificial destruction of the world-renouncers principle of
"self-identity", i.e., what in Buddhist discourse takes the form of deconstituting all
substantialist modes of world-renouncers own-being or self-existence.
In contemporary Japanese philosophy the differential logic of acentric Zen Buddhism and
its deconstructive strategy of critical decentering, Odin argues, has been appropriated by
Nishida Kitaro and the Kyoto School. In relation to postmodern strategies of "decentering," the
kenosis/nyat motif was developed by Nishida, Nirhitani and Abe of the Kyoto School.1839 In
the postscript to his translation of Nishida Kitaro's essay, 'The Logic of the Place of Nothingness
and the Religious Worldview," David A. Dilworth argues that Nishida's paradoxical logic of
soku-hi or "is and yet is not" is structurally isomorphic with Derrida's deconstructive logic of
diff'erance, which is described as operating through the adversative edge of presence and
absence in the play of textual significations.1840
Both Derrida's logic of diffrance and Nishida's logic of soku-hi are considered as crosscultural variants of the paradoxical or agonistic paradigm of articulation. According to Odin,
Nishida's 'logic of the East" assuming the form of a "self-identity of absolute contradictions",
can be said to have a deep structural proximity to Derrida's logic of diffrance wherein all
self-identity is constituted by a play of irreducible differences.1841

1838

Steve Odin, Derrida & The Decentered Universe of Chan/Zen Buddhism, in Joumal of Chinese Philosophy 17
(1990), 64-5.
1839
Steve Odin, "Kenosis as a Foundation for Christian-Buddhist Dialogue" in The Eastern Buddhist (Spring 1987),
51-4.
1840
Nishida Kitaroo, Last Writings: Nothingness and the Religious Worldview, tr. David A. Dilworth (Honolulu:
University of Haw- aii Press, 1987). See translator's Postscript On "Nishida's Logic of the East," p. 137.
1841
Odin, Derrida & The Decentered Universe of Chan/Zen Buddhism, 64-5, 66.

381

But in terms of Girards lindiffrenciation violente rather than Derridas diffrance,

Buddhist paradoxical, nonsensical, and illogical logic of soku-hi and logic of non-duality, as we
have seen, could be best understood. Buddhist logics represent originally world-renouncing,
anti-structural, agnostic and Dionysian logics of forest Buddhas and Bodhisattvas who belong to
violent sacred in his homlessness and egolessness. Buddhist agnostic logic of soku-hi and of
self-identity of absolute contradictions can be understood to refer to the tragic confrontation and
violent undifferentiation of differentiated system of logic. This Buddhist Dionysian logic of wild
and forest world-renouncer needs to be read in the light of play of the violent sacred rather than
in the light of play of textual significations. (Social) anthropological deconstruction of the
violent sacred around Buddhas can be described as a more radical deconstruction rather than a
linguistic deconstruction. Kyoto schools decontexutalized,

de-ritualized and

purely

intellectualized logic of soku-hi, logic of non-duality and logic of absolute nothingness must be
social anthropologically explicated in the sense of world-renouncing logic of Buddhist renouner
(Buddhas and Bodhisattvas) rather than in a purely formal logical sense.
Paradoxical ang agonistic logic of self-identity of absolute contradictions could be traced
back to the liminal and ambivalent forest world-renouncers self-identity of (absolute)
contradictions as a reconcilatory victim. These world-renouncing and illogical logic seems to
symbolize the ritually simulated crisis of difference, namely crisis of undifferentiation (crise
dindiffrenciation).1842 Ritual roots of this purely intellectualized logic of world-renunciation
are not to be overlooked.In understanding Kyoto schools Buddhist logics (logic of soku-hi,
logic of nyat and so on), Girards insights into this ritual, especially initiatory logic
(lindiffrenciation violente, leffacement des diffrences, les doubles symtriques, lidentit des
antagonistes and die crise des diffrences) seem to be more persuasive than Derridas logic of
diffrance. World-renouncing Buddhas and Bodhisattvas as founding world-conquerer and
cultural heros/ reconcilatory victim represent this violent undifferentiation. This worldrenouncing logic represents an initiatory logic or initiatory Great Death of common-sensical
logic, that is to say violent undifferentiation of worldly householders logic. For Girard, the
whole process of mythical formulation leads to a transferal of violent undifferentiation from
all the Thebans to the person of Oedipus, a prime example of the human scapegoat.1843 Sacred
world-renouncer representing this violent undifferentiation seems to play the founding and
civilizing role for the world order.
Roland Barthes also asserts that traditional Japanese culture was itself a dislocated semiotic
field illustrating the decentered or multicentered text described by poststructuralist discourse.
Japanese Zen Buddhist thought and culture is thought of as a kind of mirror which reflects
semiotic theories of the text formulated by contemporary postmodernism. According to the
1842

La cirse mimtique est toujours une crise dindiffrenciation (Ren Girard, Les origines de la culture.
Entretiens avec Pierpaolo Antonello et Joo Cezar de Castro Rocha (Paris: Descle de Brouwer, 2004), 63.
1843
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 77.

382

postmodernist theory of semiotics tracing back to the ideas of Saussure, language is a

differential, or relational, system in which there are no positive entities. Barthes endeavors to
demonstrate how Japan is a wholly decentered semiotic field wherein the signs are all empty. In
his discussion of Japanese aesthetics, Barthes also argues that haiku poetry reveals a Zen
Buddhist worldview of mu or nothingness which is itself free of all absolute metaphysical
centers. He speaks of the "acentric" structure of Tokyo, the capitol of Japan, which has
an"empty center" or "sacred nothing" - a vacant palace surrounded by moats and walls,
inhabited by an emperor who is never seen. This city, for Barthes, offers this precious paradox:
it does possess a center, but this center is empty.1844
This civilizational paradox of Buddhist culture and worldview based on world-renouncing
nothingness and empty center could be best explained in the sense of paradox of civilizations
with other-worldly orientations1845 and also by Girards theory on founding mechanism of
surrogate victim. For Girard, the sign is the reconciliatory victim. Buddhist empty center of
nothingness can be traced back to the sacrifical locus of the ontologically empty worldrenouncer as the founding victim. Zen Buddhist worldview of mu or nothingness represents the
paradox of Buddhist culture founded on the world-renouncing emptiness and nothingness of
Buddhas. The double transference makes the victim the transcendent signifier. Under the title
The Transcendental Signifier,1846in order to resolve the problem of violence with the surrogate
victim, Girard elaborates a theory of the sign and signification. Girard contends that even the
most elementary form of the victimage mechanism, prior to the emergence of the sign, should
be seen as an exceptionally powerful means of creating a new degree of attention, the first noninstinctual attention. Once it has reached a certain degree of frenzy, the mimetic polarization
becomes fixed on a single victim.
Reconcilatory victim represents the group from which he has been excluded. In a sense, then,
he has transcended himself. The victim appears to be simultaneously good and evil, peaceable
and violent, a life that brings death and a death that guarantees life. In this sense the victim seem
to constitute a universal signifier. The signifier is the victim, Girard says. The signified
constitutes all actual and potential meaning the community confers on to the victim and, through
its intermediacy, on to all things. For Girard, the sign is the reconciliatory victim. The
imperative of ritual is therefore never separated from the manipulation of signs and their
constant multiplication, a process that generates new possibilities of cultural differentiation and
enrichment. The processes related to hunting, the domestication of animals, sexual prohibitions,
etc., might all be described, according to Girard, as the manipulation and differentiation of the

1844

Roland Barthes, Empire of Signs, tr. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982) ; Odin, Derrida & The
Decentered Universe of Chan/Zen Buddhism, 70.
1845
Eisenstadt, Die Paradoxie von Zivilisationen mit auerweltlichen Orientierungen. berlegungen zu Max
Webers Studie ber Hinduismus und Buddhismus.
1846
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 99-104.

383

sign constituted by victimage. Driven by sacred terror and wishing to continue life under the
sign of the reconciliatory victim, men attempt to reproduce and represent this sign.
Abe puts a cross mark on Emptiness or Nothingness just as Heidegger put a cross mark on
Sein to effect the cancellation of Being, In such a manner he employs the fundamental
postmodernist strategy for avoiding every kind of ontological reification, which Derrida refers
to as placing all signification "under erasure" (sous rature). By placing nyat under erasure so
as to render it non-nyat with a cross mark X, it thereby takes on the ontological status of
differential trace, understood as a dynamic interplay of presence and absence or identity and
difference in the locus of absolute nothingness.1847 (World-renouncers) nyat under erasure
or with a cross mark X must be read sacrificially from the viewpoint of violent expulsion and
radical elimination of world-renouncer. Thus sacrificial trace of surrogate victim mechanism
could be found in this sacred nyat under violent erasure.
Therefore some superficial parallels drawn between the deconstructive philosophy of J.
Derrida and the Buddhist philosophy should be reexamined. Derridean negation and the
Mdhyamika prasaga (reductio ad absurdum) are understood to be comparable in the sense of
the negativity at work in both traditions. Both are considered to proceed from linguistic
deconstruction to critiques of ontotheologies. But behind these two kinds of deconstructive
textual practices, there are different philosophical agendas. Mdhyamika deconstructions and
self-deconstructions follow a clearly directional path, defined by step-by-step advancements
and negations of lemmas. The Mdhyamika tetralemma effects a radical negation of all existing
positions and, if seen from these positions, represents a "non-sensical" position. A leading
Chinese Mdhyamika thinker undertakes the self-deconstruction of this Mdhyamika
tetralemma, he continues to follow the path of reductio ad absurdum and reaches a hexa-lemma:
neither-affirmation-nor-denial-of-both-being-and-nonbeing. His hexalemma itself seems to
exemplify the most mind-taxing, the most non-sensical of the Mdhyamika non-sense.1848
All things are void, including the utterance of the teaching of voidness.
The self-deconstruction in Buddhist negative dialetic is to be read anthropologically, namely
as the world-renouncing logic of negativity which was the (sacrificial) logic of worldrenouncers. Logic of (soteriological) self-deconstruction has to be comprehended in terms of
world-renouncers dharma of nothingness and egolessness. Unlike Derrida, Mdhyamika
Buddhists do not see their deconstructive non-sense as a consequence that needs
justification. For them, such non -sense helps lead to enlightenment beyond language and
conceptuality. Their deconstructive endeavors are geared to none other than dawning of
Nirvana upon the transcendence of language and conceptual thinking. 1849 Therefore the
similarity between linguistic deconstructionism of Derrida and sacrificial self-deconstruction of
1847

Odin, Derrida & The Decentered Universe of Chan/Zen Buddhism, 69-70.

Cai Zongqi, Derrida and Seng-Zhao: Linguistic and Philosophical Deconstructions, in Philosophy East and
West 43/3 (1993), 394, 400.
1849
Zongqi, Derrida and Seng-Zhao: Linguistic and Philosophical Deconstructions, 400.
1848

384

Buddhism seems to be only formalistic.

4.2.

Formalistic Expulsion of Anthropological Content

Girard considers deconstruction as a formalism, an evacuation of content in favor of

linguistic play. Girard reproves formalist exclusivity and tendency for its implicit nihilism,
arguing for a return to content of historical, social, and psychical meaning.1850 Instead of
formalistic and linguistic preoccupation with Buddhist voidness, the recontextualization of
Buddhist emptiness into world renounciation and rediscovery of anthropological content of
nothingness is needed. In his work Theory and Its Terrors, Girard criticized the celebration of
form and formalistic and idealistic bias in literary studies during the time of avant-garde.
Formalistic studies were, according to Girard, becoming more and more unsubstantial.
Girard maintains that this background is necessary to understand why the new European
methodologies of structuralism and deconstruction as represented by such figures as Barthes,
Lvi-Strauss, Foucault, and Derrida were so successful in USA. And Saussurian linguistics
became a means to confirm and reinforce the expulsion
content.
of
Post

-structuralism

continued to rely on structural linguistics to discredit the referentiality of all texts.1851 The
peoples of the world, Girard says, do not invent their gods. They deify their victims. What
prevents researchers from discovering this truth, for Girard, is their refusal to grasp the real
violence behind the texts that represent it. The refusal of the real is the number one dogma of
our time, says Girard.1852
Unlike the formalistic or linquistic expulsion of anthropological content of liminal worldrenouncers specific existence, we must trace back to the social anthropological content and
context of Buddhist emptiness. Buddhist logic of emptiness has to be understood against the
background of social anthropologically specific existence and logic of world-renouncer who
strives to deny his individual biological self in the interests of maintaining his separateness from
a social existence. Voidness was dharma of world-renouncer. Girardian social anthropological
deconstruction of Buddhist emptiness can be considered more radical than the linquistic
deconstruction. The deconstructive critique of metaphysics, logocentrism, ontotheology, and the
like, corresponds, according to McKenna, in its structure and dynamics to Girards critique of
sacrificial practices. The occlusions and exclusions to which writing, the grapheme, are
subjected, are comparable with the destiny of the sacrificial victim. It is as if Derrida describes
as happening to the linquistic signifier something that Girard describes as happening at the
1850

Robert Doran, Editors Introduction, in Ren Girard, Mimesis and Theory. Essays on Literature and Criticism,
1953-2005. ed. Robert Doran (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), xxiv.
1851
Ren Girard, Mimesis and Theory. Essays on Literature and Criticism, 1953-2005, ed. Robert Doran (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2008), 198-9.
1852
Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 70.

385

foundation of cultural institutions.1853

Examining the pivotal terms in the analyses of Derrida, Girard see that beyond the
deconstruction of philosophical concepts, it is always a question of the paradoxes of the
sacred. This is also true for a reading of Heidegger. Everything that he says concerning being
can also be said of the sacred, but philosophers will, as Girard argues, hardly admit this since
they have no desire to go back beyond Plato and the pre-Socratics to consider Greek
Religion.1854 Not only being of Heidegger, but also of nothingess of Buddhismus is said of the
sacred (le sacr) of the emptying world-renoucer. Emptiness is anthropologically to be
explicated as world-renouncing values of Bodhisattvas. The Bodhisattva, when practicing the
Perfection of Wisdom does not perceive the existence of a Bodhisattva. Why is this?
Bodhisattva is empty.1855 World-renouncer is empty. Therefore emptiness of renouncer is also
sacrificial: the purpose of the emptiness meditations is said to be to abandon the ordinary idea
of self and are sometimes linkened to the death of the (world-renouncing) meditator, as he
dissolves his ordinary self into the dharmakya.1856 The anthropological reading of Buddhist
nothingness in the light of mimetic theory means the more radical deconstruction that reaches
the mechanisms of the sacred and no longer hesitates to come to terms with the surrogate victim.
1857

Buddhist negativism is not to be understood as nihilism, but to be read anthropologically

from the viewpoint of world-negating and self-emptying dharma and logic of world-renouncer.
As we saw earlier, renunciation, it is claimed, is a negative state- as its very name suggests a
denial of all that makes society what it is. Renunciation is essentially a negative state
constituting an anti-structure, a total rejection and the reversal of the value system of society. It
is defined not by what it is, but by its rejection of the social structures. World renunciation is not
defined which is not defined by its own dharma, but by the negation of the dharma of life-inthe-world. Its dharma consists in the denial of the dharma of society.1858
And world-renouncer is the exception, who is defined by what he has given up rather than
by what he does. His dharma consists of prohibitions rather than injunctions.1859 Oedipus also,
a surrogate victim, is unique in at least one respect: he alone is guilty of patricide and incest. He
is presented as a monstrous exception to the general run of mankind; he resembles nobody,
and nobody resembles him.1860
The major problematic raised by Nishitani is the overcoming of modern nihilism as
described by Nietzsche. According to Nishitani, nihility or relatve nothingness can only be
1853
1854
1855
1856
1857
1858
1859
1860

McKenna, Violence and Difference. Girard, Derrida, and Deconstruction, 12.

Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 64.
Luis O. Gmez, From the Extraordinary to the Ordinary: Images of the Bodhisattva in East Asia, 156.
English, Vajrayogin. Her Visualizations, Rituals, and Forms. A Study of the Cult of Vajrayogin in India, 130.
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 64.
Patrick Olivelle, A Definition of World Renunciation, 75, 80, 83.
Olivelle, Sanysa Upani ads. Hindu Scriptures on Asceticism and Renunciation, 67.
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 22.

386

overcome by converting to true emptiness or absolute nothingness as described by Zen

Buddhism. Hence, all substantial things in the realm of being which have been nullified in the
abyss of nihility are now affirmed just as they are in their positive suchness at the standpoint
of emptiness or absolute nothingness. For Odin, Nishitani's use of a postmodernist language
of "decentering" in order to express the standpoint of emptiness or absolute nothingness has
been influenced not only by the deconstructive element of Zen thought in the East but also by
the deconstructionism inherent in Nietzsche's positive nihilism in the West. In this context
Nishitani emphasizes the total shattering of all "man- centered" and "God-centered" orientations
by Nietzsche's sledgehammer of Eternal Recurrence. All things are affirmed exactly as they are
in their positive suchness on the field of absolute nothingness. Hence, following the direction
of Nietzsche's positive nihilism or transnihilism, Nishitani deconstructs all substantial
metaphysical centers in order to arrive at a standpoint of complete affirmation. Indeed, using
Nistzschean terms Nishitani calls emptiness or absolute nothingness the "field of Great
Affirmation."1861

4.3.

The Undifferentiated and Forest World-Renouncer

This deconstructive element of Buddhist thought should be comprehended in the light of

sacrificial self-deconstruction of world-renouncer as differentiating surrogate victim. Through
the founding and differentiating logic and mechanism of surrogate victim, the sacrificial locus
and undifferentiated field of absolute nothingness becomes the differentiated field of Great
Affirmation. Therefore the seemingly deconstructive Buddhist emptiness and nothingness may
be interpreted as violent traces of some crisis of degree or crisis of undifferentiation climaxed
by its habitual resolution, the collective transfer on a single victim. Buddhist undifferentiated
logic of soku-hi, non-duality and nothingness could be traced back to Dionysian and tantric
ritual, for example undifferentiated and non-dual unity of Buddhas and prostitutes and
undifferentiation of orgiastic rituals in tantric Buddhism.
For Girard, the notion of undifferentiated certainly corresponds to part of what goes on in
rituals all over the world: promiscuous sexual encounters, the overturning of hierarchies, the
supposed metamorphosis of the participants into each other or into monstrous beings, etc.
However, that rituals, according to Girard, are not committed to this undifferentiated once and
for all. All great traditional interpretation, notably the Hindu and the Chinese, attribute to ritual
the end that Lvi-Strauss would reserve to myth alone: differentiation or regeneration of
differences. The undifferentiated presents itself as preliminary to (re)differentiation and often as

1861

Odin, Derrida & The Decentered Universe of Chan/Zen Buddhism, 67-8.

387

its prerequisite.1862 The violently undifferentiated logic of soku-hi and non-duality presents
itself as (initiatory) preliminary to (re)differentiation.
Dynamic nyat that are dharma, logic and value of world-renouncing Buddhas as
founding victim are differentiating. Mimetic symmetry generates disorder and violence and is a
perpetual disequilibrium that is stabilized by the scapegoat mechanism: the zero hour of
culture and the zeo degree of structure. The culture produced by this differentiating
mechanism will possess a structure based upon asymmetry and difference. And, this
asymmetry and the differences associated with it form what we call the cultural order. That is
how order comes out of disorder. This zero hour of culture, which is also the hour of sacrifice
the founding sacrifice, absolutely and radically separates the structures of the cultural order and
those of the disorder of undifferentiated violence, while transforming the one into the other.1863
Paradox of Buddhas differentiating and dynamic nothingness could be best explained by this
differentiating mechanism.
According to Girards mimetic hypothesis, the mechanism that reintroduces difference
into a situation in which everyone has come to resemble everyone else is sacrifice. Humanity
results from sacrifice. What Girard calls after Freud the founding murder, in other words, the
immolation of a sacrificial victim that is both guilty of disorder and able to restore order, is
constantly re-enacted in the rituals at the origin of our institutions. This is the implacable logic
of the sacred, which myths dissimulate less and less as humans become increasingly self-aware.
The decisive point in this evolution is Christian revelation, for Girard, a kind of divine
expiation in which God through his Son could be seen as asking for forgiveness from humans
for having revealed the mechanisms of their violence so late. Christianity demystifies religion.
Demystification, which is good in the absolute, has proven bad in the relative, for we, Girard
argues, were not prepared to shoulder its consequences.1864
Vanheeswijck refers to the thematic congeniality between Girards thought and that of our
French postmodern thinkers, paying attention to the theme of difference and more specifically
to the resemblance and the differences between Girard and Derrida. Girard unmasks, together
with figures like Sartre, and Lacan, the violent aspects of such a philosophy of identity and
places value on difference. By undermining the modern ideal of authonomy and by putting into
relief human vulnerability and finitude, Girard distances himself from a philosophy of
subjectivity . In a later period, Girard elaborates the pharmakon of Derrida analysis of the
process of hand-writing into the scapegoat mechanism, by putting its efficacy with history and
the actual social context instead of limiting its function to language and intertextuality, as
Derrida does. As mentioned earlier, Derrida limits the pharmakons ambiguity to the level of
textuality. In Girards view, the force of expulsion does not only situate itself on a textual level,
1862
1863
1864

Girard, "To Double Business Bound": Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology, 155-7.
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 312-4.
Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benot Chantre, ix-x.

388

but refers mainly to a real expulsion.1865

For Loy, Derrida's approach is still logocentric, for what needs to be deconstructed is not
just language but the world we live in and the way we live in it, trapped within a cage of our
own making. According to him, the history of Buddhist thought is the history of making these
problems central and deconstructing them by revealing the logocentricity that motivates
them. Loy argues that Buddhist philosophy has been preoccupied with refuting any tendency to
postulate a transcendental-signified, including any "hyperessentialism." 1866 As mentioned
earlier, Buddhist deconstruction, more exactly world-renouncers self-deconstruction is
sacrificial and anti-structural in violating, transgressing and undifferentiating the worldly
common-sensical logocentricity. The hidden mechanism (of surrogate victim) polarized around
Buddhas transgressive deconstruction must be deconstructed.
When, in The Republic, Plato describes, Girard says, the undifferentiating and violent effects
of mimesis, one can note the emergence of the theme of twins and also that of the mirror. This is
remarkable, but then no one has ever attempted to read Plato in the light of ethnology. For
Girard, precisely such a reading is necessary in order truly to deconstruct any metaphysics.
Aside from the pre-Socratics, to whom Heidegger and contemporary Heideggerean thought
return, there is only religion, and one must understand religion in order to understand
philosophy. 1867 In order to deconstruct the seemingly deconstructive and antimetaphysical
Buddhist metaphysics of nothingness, one must re-read Buddhist philosophy representing
world-renouncers logic of renunciation in the light of social anthropology and of dialectic
between world-renunciation and world order.
For Girard, the discovery of the scapegoat as the mechanism of symbolic thought, human
thought itself, justifies a deconstructive discourse and at the same time completes it. Girard
maintains that this still partial deconstruction confounds our present philosophical and cultural
crisis with a radical impotence of thought and language. Deconstruction seems content with a
pure mirroring of the sacred that amounts to nothing, at this stage, but a purely literary effect; it
risks degenerating into pure verbalism. Western thought, Girard says, continues to function as
the effacement of founding violences traces. We are dealing with traces of traces of traces.1868
Buddhist also continues to function as the effacement of founding violences traces.
As already suggested, Girard see that beyond the deconstruction of philosophical concepts,
it is always a question of the paradoxes of the sacred. For more radical deconstruction of
ambiguous philosophical concepts of Buddhism that originally represents yogic and worldrenouncing philosophies, ethics and logics of world-renouncer, we must trace back to the
question of the violent paradoxes of the Buddhist sacred represented by the specialists of the
sacred. The ambiguity of Buddhist logic (of non-duality, emptiness and so on) must be read in
1865
1866
1867
1868

Vanheeswijck, The Place of Ren Girard in Contemporary Philosophy, 97-102.

Loy, The Deconstruction of Buddhism, 227-8.
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 15.
Ibid., 64-5.

389

the light of the two faces of the (Buddhist) sacred the interplay of order and disorder, of
difference lost and retrieved, as enacted in the immutable drama of the sacrifice of the
incestuous king as the victim. This term serves to describe all the royal transgressions, all
forbidden as well as all permitted sexual practices, all forms of violence and brutality and the
scandalous conjunction of violence and the sacred.1869

4.4.

Pharmakon, Scapegoat and N Theater

As mentioned earlier, seeing that beyond the deconstruction of philosophical concepts, it is

always a question of the paradoxes of the sacred, Girard elaborates the pharmakon of Derrida
analysis of the process of hand-writing into the scapegoat mechanism, by putting its efficacy
with history and the actual social context instead of limiting its function to language and
intertextuality.1870 Paradoxical and often nonsensical Buddhist philosophy and logic also have
something to do with the question of the paradoxes of the (violent) sacred represented by
Buddhist world-renouncing specialists of the sacred
In this context, I shall deal with Terasakis discussion about the striking similarity
between the concept of kygen kigo (wild words and specious phrases) in the N play Jinen
Koji and Platos idea of the pharmakon in the light of Girards victimary hypothesis. Jinen Koji
is an intensely dramatic N play that unfolds a dismal human situation in the context of feudal
Japanese society and within the framework of Mahayana Buddhism: a young girl sells herself to
slave merchants to procure a memorial service for her parents. Her endeavors result in the
Bodhisattva act. One of the most important techniques the play utilizes is that of kygen kigo
(wild words and specious phrases) the specific use of the frivolous

arts to aid in

achieving Buddhist enlightenment. Kygen literally means crazy words, and refers to
something that does not accord with reasons, i.e., wild, foolish, mad, etc., and kigo means
specious, empty, useless or frivolous expressions: obscene or vicious jokes, untruthful
statements. The conflict of Jinen Koji, according to Terasaki,

takes place within the lowest

strata of medieval society, where the powerful victimize the weak. It is important to note that the
characters are all socially marginal figures. This N play Jinen Koji deals with an event
considered provocative even in the days when child kidnapping, selling into bondage, and
forced prostitution were not unusual. A number of N plays deal with kidnapped children or
their deranged mothers from the capital searching for their loved ones. By offering herself to
the Buddha, she expresses her own desire for enlightenment as well. Terasaki has noted the
striking similarity between the concept of kygen kigo and Platos idea of the pharmakon, that
1869
1870

Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 257.

Vanheeswijck, The Place of Ren Girard in Contemporary Philosophy, 101.

390

writing functions both as poison and remedy.1871

Wild words and specious phrases (kygen kigo ) in the N play appears to be associated
with scapegoat. Girard cites a Japanese anthropologist, Masao Yamaguchi who has gathered the
principal Japanese ritual institutions such as the emperor, the geishas, the theatre, the
marionettes, etc., under the heading of what he calls the scapegoat. According to Yamaguchi,
there is no word in Japanese to translate the modern meaning of scapegoat. In certain types of
travelling theatre, the principal hero, who is of course the one who plays the role of the
scapegoat, is so polluted by the end of the performance that he has to leave the community
without having contact with anyone or anything. In this sort of theatre, for Girard, we come
upon an intermediary form between ritual expulsion and dramatic art.1872
Making it impossible for the thoughtful reader ever again to be uncritically satisfied with a
purely aesthetic response to Japanese literature, Marra has analyzed how the excluded world
was eventually aestheticized in new versions of n that provided military leaders with
representations of authority and power. N theatre could be described as a theatre of
defilement and the aesthetics of impurity.1873
In explaining the role played by n within a Buddhist ritual of purification and pacification,
Marra also cited Yamaguchi Masao, who has devised a scheme for the interpretation of n that
although originally applied to Semimaru, the story of Emperor Daigos blind son provides a
thorough explanation of the plays that are most closely related to the problem of outcasts
defilement. The actor/character shelters the positive elements of society such as centers of
power, normality, organized settlements, the law, the capital from the negative factors
margins of power, abnormality, vagrancy, liminality, and the countryside that challenge social
stability. The process aims at either the avoidance of disorder or the restoration of order to any
community that patronizes this theatrical ritual, be it a temple, a village, the court, or the
shoguns palace. Because of the alleged ability of actors to free the community from evil,
troupes of outcasts were invited, put on stage, and then discarded after the other had been
completely absorbed by the performers who, like dolls of pollution were then floated down
the river to their new location, a temple or a neighboring village.1874
Derrida limits the pharmakons ambiguity to the level of textuality. In his semantic
investigation of the Greek word pharmakon in his essay "Plato's Pharmacy," in Dissemination.,
Derrida has dealt with the undecidability of the word between "remedy" and "drug," "cure" and
"poison." In Girards view, the play of expulsion does not only situate itself on a textual level,

1871

Etsuko Terasaki, Wild Words and Specious Phrases: Kygen Kigo in the N Play Jinen Koji. In Harvard
Journal of Asiatic Studies. 1989. 49: 2, pp. 519-552, pp. 519/29, 536.
1872
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 131-3.
1873
Marra, The Buddhist Mythmaking of Defilement: Sacred Courtesans in Medieval Japan. See Chapter Two.
The Aesthetics of Impurity: A Theatre of Defilement.
1874
Michele Marra, Representations of Power. The Literary Politics of Medieval Japan (Honolulu: University of
Hawaii Press, 1993), 77-8.

391

bur refers mainly to a real expulsion.1875

Girards theory sees behind the ambiguity of the pharmakon the working of a scapegoat
mechanism as the foundation of human culture, which ultimately has to be unmasked.
According to Derrida, Plato in the Phaedrus is arguing for the primacy of speech over writing
and uses the word pharmakon for the latter, thus portraying it with the ambiguous double
meaning of remedy-poison. The related word pharmakos was the designation for the human
scapegoat who, on occasions of crisis in Greek city-states, would be ritually expelled or
sacrificed. Derrida shows that the two terms (pharmakon and pharmakos) share more than just
their lexical ties. Writing as pharmakon has structural and functional affinities with the
pharmakos in Greek culture: the scapegoat, the sacrificial victim whose violent expulsion
purifies the community. The Greek pharmakoi, singular pharmakos, refers to victims who were
ritually beaten, driven out of cities, and killed, for example, by being forced over the edge of a
precipice. The word pharmakos, designating a person who is selected as a ritual victim, is
related to pharmakon, which means both remedy and poison, depending on the context.1876
Derrida calls attention to the pharmakos in arguing that Plato is performing a similar
operation on writing. The human scapegoat provides a secondary support for Derrida's primary
concern with the violence in Plato's text of expelling writing in favor of speech. Girard agrees
with Derrida's textual analysis but turns his method around to emphasize what Derrida takes to
be secondary, namely, the violence to real human scapegoats. According to Mckenna, Derrida
marks Platos silence about these affinities, but he is silent in turn about the properly sacrificial
dimension of philosophical discourse, a dimension in which his own silence is implicated.
Philosophy is an institution like many another; if the origin of culture and cultural institutions is
sacrificial, philosophy, in Mckennas words, will not be immune to sacrificial
mechanisms.1877
The mutations of meaning from the human katharma to the medical katharsis are paralleled
by those of the human pharmakos to the medical pharmakon, which signifies at once poison
and remedy.1878 The victimary mechanism lies at the origins of all cultural institutions.
Through this sacrificial logic behind the generation of all human cultures and societies, for
Girard, all postritual institutions including the theater, philosophy, the judicial system and
political institutions.1879 Theater performances are also rooted in collective violence and are a
form of ritual, though even more cleansed of violence than animal sacrifices. The Aristotelian
catharsis is an intellectualized or sublimated version of the original sacrificial effect and ritual
purification.1880 Theater represents a sacrificial crisis.
1875
1876
1877
1878
1879
1880

Vanheeswijck, The Place of Ren Girard in Contemporary Philosophy, 102.

Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 51.
McKenna, Violence and Difference. Girard, Derrida, and Deconstruction, 28, 37.
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 288.
Girard, "To Double Business Bound": Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology, 169.
Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 77-8.

392

The tragic heroes in this N theater could be understood as substitute scapegoats. In his
paper Tragic Victims in Japanese Religion, Politics, and the Arts, Plutschow draws attention to
the presence in Japan of a victimary discourse and a scapegoat mechanism which, beyond
religion, helped shape Japanese politics, literature and the arts. This victimary discourse, has
been so influential in pre-modern Japanese culture, that it became a national ideology. An entire
genre of Japanese literature the tales of the failing heroes including such great classics as the
Heike Monogatari, and numerous dramatic as well as pictorial works such as the Kitano Tenjin
Engi Emaki, a national treasure, draw from it. These deified victims also functioned as
scapegoats. They were highly ambivalent. They are both devils and deities, able to cause, but
also to abate and prevent calamities. These were the deities on whom the community would
hand their sins, and on whom they would rely to overcome their calamities. Seeing a play or
hearing a story or reading about these victims was believed not only prevent calamities and
perpetuate the order but, psychologically, to defer resentment, revenge and violence. Literary
and theatrical heroes stand for any victim that many threaten the stability of the state. Rather
than sacrificing some living human or animal for the good of the rest, as was practiced in many
other cultures, this is a system whereby already dead victims are called to play the role of
scapegoats. The tragic heroes in literature and the theater are not living but substitute
scapegoats.1881 Thus like the violent origins of all tragic theatre, we can assume the violent and
sacrificial roots of Japanese (Buddhist) N Theater.
In the following another (Buddhist) N theatre, we can see an tragic heroine who plays
the role of the scapegoat. Sotoba Komachi (Komachi by the Stupa) is a complex play which
explores mutiple facets in the personality of the flam-boyant court poetess of the mid-ninth
century, Ono no Komachi who emerges as a fascinating central figure. Ironically because of the
seriousness of her transgressions, her path to attaining enlightenment is assured in the end. The
events of Komachs life, highlighted in a series of episodes narrated and enacted in the play, are
subsumed to the purpose of Shingon Buddhist doctrine, so that the play embodies both the
soteriological purpose of Buddhism and the artistic ideals of the N. She is depicted on the one
hand as a brilliant poetess of the Heian court, and on the other hand as an old mendicant who
suffers terrible karmic retribution. It is also regarded as a Possession-by-Madness play since the
main character becomes possessed and deranged in the course of the play. The belief in
possession, along with basic Buddhist concepts, had a powerful hold on the imagination of
medieval people, and made them emotionally receptive to the number of N plays which treat
possession as a central theme.1882
Komachi whom we see in the play, is an old beggar woman who is a rootless social
outcast. Komachi emerges from the formless chaos into a center, a fixed point of reference,
1881

Herbert Plutschow, Tragic Victims in Japanese Religion, Politics, and the Arts, in: Anthropoetics 6, no. 2 (Fall
2000/Winter 2001).
1882
Etsuko Terasaki, Images and Symbols in Sotoba Komachi: A Critical Analysis of a N Playm, in Harvard
Journal of Asiatic Studies 44/1 (1984), 155-8.

393

the sacred space or manifested. Her transgressions must be viewed in terms of surrogate
victim mechanism. She contradicts the Buddhist priest on every point, insisting that even a
wrongful act or delusion could lead one to enlightenment. She repudiates the distinction
between opposites: evil versus goodness, stupidity versus wisdom, rancor versus mercy, etc.
She as a tragic victim undifferentiates the fundamental distinctions and differences. We,
according to Terasaki, are aware of her evil reputation and of the nature of her
transgressions, but her salvation is surely attainable in terms of Mahayana Buddhisms allinclusive theory. The transformations are skillfully orchestrated to reveal the stages in the
disintegration of Komachis personality, under the pressure of karmic retribution, from a
highly intellectual poetess, to a decrepit old beggar, and finally to a volatile madwoman. The
reality of Komachis begging scene is emphasized by the images of everyday objects necessary
for survival, namely food and clothing. The selection of concrete images captures the essence of
a mendicants life. Komachs possession by the angry spirit of Fukakusa is the symbolic of the
ultimate limit of her past transgression, for which she has been punished, and from which she
seeks diliverance. The possessed Komachi transforms herself into Fukakusa . Tormentor and
tormented become embodied in one person. This spectacle of double identity, Fukakusas
outward image superimposed one Komachs, must have powerfully affected the sensibility of its
medieval audience, which believed in spirits, especially malignant and vengeful ones.
Komachis remorse provides an example of the Mahayana pratice of dean (Japanese
sange, .whereby one admits ones transgression before the Buddha in order to obtain expiation,
keka, for an offense). Komachi is depicted as an old woman of nearly one hundread, who has
been suffering for many years the consequences of her cruel acts.

1883

For Girard, although the reconcilatory victim is required to commit all sorts of violent
crimes, there is no reason to associate his performance with the avant-garde theater or to see
him as a sort of antihero of the contemporary counterculture. The victim must show himself
worthy of his punishment fully as worthy as the original outcast from whom the ceremony
derives. It is important to cultivate the future victims supposed potential for evil, to transform
him into a monster of iniquity not for esthetic reasons, but to enable him to polarize, to
literally draw to himself, all the infectious strains in the community and transform them into
sources of peace and fecundity.1884
Buddhist universal enlightenment is based on the theory of non-duality that there is no
distinction between opposites. The core of this idea, essential to Komachis salvation, is
transgression, or gyakuen. It is said, sin itself may be the ladder of salvation. In the stupa
scene Komachi speaks in a tone of absolute confidence that transgression itself can be used

1883
1884

Ibid., 165-80.
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 107.

394

positively as a springborard to enlightenment. With proper intention and practice, even

1885

transgression can be a step on the journey to enlightenment.

She is depicted on the one hand as a brilliant poetess of the Heian court, and on the other
hand as an old mendicant who suffers terrible karmic retribution.

1886

Girards mechanism of

surrogate victim offers useful models for approaching this very specific Buddhist idea of
criminal transgression as the ladder or springboard of enlightenment.

5.

Process Philosophy and Sacrificial Emptiness

5.1.

Process Philosophy and Sacrificial Emptiness

Some similarities between Alfred North Whiteheads process philosophy and Buddhism has
been pointed out. The primary areas of convergence are impermanence and process as
fundamental aspects of reality and the emptiness and lack of substance of things, and so on. The
originally world-renouncers rejection of substances and his specific notion of impermanence
seem to resemble Whitehead's conceptuality. But some of their similarities might be only
superficial resemblances. As Masao Abe argues, we cannot overlook some important
differences between them. In Abes view these differences, although subtle and often
inconspicuous, are essential, fundamental, and intrinsic, being deeply rooted in the structure of
their ways of thinking and of understanding reality. Despite the fact that these two systems
contain many parallels, there is a deep gulf between them. For Abe, it is only after a clear
understanding of these essential differences in their thought-structure or structural differences
that a productive and fruitful encounter between them can proceed on a solid basis. Whitehead's
idea of the relatedness of actual entities is similar to the Buddhist idea of pratiityasamutpaada,
which may be translated as "dependent coorigination," "relationality," or "conditioned
coproduction" Rejecting the Aristotelian idea of "primary substance," Whitehead emphasizes
the interdependence of actual entities.1887
Attention must be paid to the essential, fundamental, and intrinsic differences, being deeply
rooted in the structure of their ways of thinking and of understanding reality, between Buddhist
world-renouncers yogic philosophy and Western-modern Whiteheads process philosophy.
Pratitya samutpada explaining the Buddhist rejection of substances and the notion of
impermanence expresses what is seen from world-renouncers yogic and enlightened level.
Whitehead's conceptuality, as Masao Abe argues, remains at the ordinary level. There is a deep
1885

Terasaki, Images and Symbols in Sotoba Komachi: A Critical Analysis of a N Play, 155-8, 165-80, 182-4.
Ibid., 155-8, 157-8.
1887
Masao Abe, Mahayana Buddhism and Whitehead-- A View by a Lay Student of Whitehead's Philosophy,
Philosophy East & West V. 25 (July 1975), 415-428, 415.
1886

395

conceptual difference between Buddhist, more concretely world-renouncers sacrificial

ontology and that of Whitehead, a western mathematical physicist. For Abe, Nagarjuna's
negation of negation is not merely a logical process but an existential and religious issue.
(World-renouncers) negation of negation does not signify a logical development of negation in
an objective or external manner, but (world-renouncers) serious inner struggle and an eventual
breaking-through of the existential antinomy (in his initiation of world-renouncing
meditation).1888
According to Abe, a trace of dualism still remains in Whitehead owing to the double
structure of God and the world in their nature and activity. Abe rightly points out that the
realization of the Great Death is the crucial point for the seemingly paradoxical Mahayana
doctrines. Through a further elucidation of the Buddhist idea of world-renouncing emptiness,
we have already read the hidden sacrificial logic and mechanism behind or around worldrenouncers (initiatory) Greath Death. For Abe, there is almost no reference to death in
Whiteheads Process and Reality. Again, in this Whiteheads book, the continuum or the
conjunction, in Abes viewpoint, seems to be more emphasized than the disjunction. The result
is that Whitehead's philosophy is that of organism, and in it God is treated as the principle of
creativity, limitation, and judgment. Against the Western metaphysical tradition -- which had
generally put stress on being, substance, transcendence, and duality -- Whitehead emphasizes
becoming, process, immanence and relatedness. However, Abe argues, the lack of the
realization of the absolute nothingness and Death in the deepest sense prevents Whitehead
from breaking through the framework of dualism. Nevertheless, within the context of
dualism, he has expounded and developed the notion of the relatedness of everything in its
limit. According to Abe, the duality is minimized but not overcome in Whitehead. Although
"becoming" rather than "being," "process" rather than "substance," "flux" rather than
unchanging "permanence" are stressed in Mahayana Buddhism, they are at every point
supported, in one's existential realization, by the realization of the absolute Nothingness.This
is the reason that basically, becoming, process, and flux have no teleological implication in
Mahayana Buddhism.1889
However great the affinities between a process understanding of all reality as constituted by
internal relations to the Buddhist understanding of reality as constituted by radical dependent
origination, the differences, as Tracy rightly argues, are equally clear. For Whitehead, there is
both teleology and order to the unending relational process; hence a teleological order is needed
in order to understand the relational process of creativity itself. For process theology, there is,
above all, the necessity for order, yielding the process, di-polar God who orders reality. But
once the process category of freedom enters the Buddhist understanding of the true freedom
of the treu self as untimately no-self, such agential process freedom must, according to
1888
1889

Abe, Mahayana Buddhism and Whitehead-- A View by a Lay Student of Whitehead's Philosophy, 421.
Ibid., 425-6.

396

Tracy, be frankly disavowed on inner-Buddhist terms. Other thinkers like Langdon Gilkey have
suggested that the nearest analogue in Western thought is neither Whitehead nor Hegel but a
radical, non-reductionist process-like form of naturalism like that of John Dewey. For in
Deweyan naturalism all reality is reality-in-process but a process more like the Buddhists than
like Whiteheads: without God and without restriction. And yet even here the differences from
Buddhism, for Tracy, become clear. Neither Deweys trust in scientific method nor the
democratic implications Dewey construed in the naturalistic process view of reality are shared
by most Buddhist thinkers. Rather, as Nishitani makes clear, for the Buddhist thinker, both the
modern naturalists trust in scientific method and any naturalist belief in a telos to the socialpolitical process cannot but prove another illustration of the Western law of infinite desire.
Once its telos is exposed as an illusion, the desparate law of infinite desire leads to a nihility that
masks an ultimate nihilism. Western humanist nihilism, Tracy argues, cannot disclose the true
Buddhist realization of the Nothingness that finally dissolves the law of infinite desire by
enlightening and liberating the compulsive ego-self from its desire to realize the no-self of
nyat.1890
The unveiled sacrificial logic and mechanism behind this world-renouncers existential
realization of the absolute Nothingness should not be overlooked. By a more careful
examination of Buddhist world-renouncing idea of nothingness, we have already known that
originally nothingness, voidness and emptiness in Buddhism was the soteriological, namely
world-renoucing values of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. Nothingness is of world-renouncer from
forest and is only seen from the the point of view of yogic experience, not of normal persons in
village. But the originally world-renoucing voidness of Buddhist renouncers has been
decontextualized and then misunderstood, for example in the sense of modern physics, of
deconstructionism, of process philosophy and so on. As King pointed out, the tendency to make
Buddha into a great scientist needs to be critically evaluated.1891
But to call the Buddha the first great scientist, for Gombrich, is a typical Protestant
Buddhist attempt to beat the modern West at its own game.1892His (world-renouncing) insight
into the insubstantiality and impermanence of all nature processes was thought to indicate his
complete mastery of the principles of modern physics. This is clearly a confusion of an
intuitive, qualitative sense of the flux of nature, with the fully specific determination of physical
dimensions and relationships within the nature, which is the material of science. King has
rightly aurged that this is on a par with the attempt to equate Vanity, Vanity, all is Vanity of
Ecclesiastic with the Einsteinian formulae of relativity.1893

1890
1891
1892
1893

Tracy, Dialogue with the Other: The Inter-Religious Dialogue, 69-70.

King, A Thousand Lives Away. Buddhism in Contemporary Burma, 145.
Gombrich, Theravda Buddhism : A Social History from Ancient Benares to Modern Colombo, 196.
King, A Thousand Lives Away. Buddhism in Contemporary Burma, 145.

397

5.2.

Nothingness has No Physical Meaning

But nothingness has no physical meaning in the sense of atomic voidness. It was
soteriological concept. 1894 Conze has rightly emphasized yogic presupposition of Buddhist
thought and philosophy. Buddhist philosophy is yogic philosophy. Many soteriological concepts
are seen from the standpoint of yogi and come from yoga-experience. 1895 It was the worldrenoucing concept of renouncers with his meditation on voidness and emptiness. This radical
decontextualization of emptiness from world renunciation can be read against the background of
rapid modernization of Buddhism. In trying to distance themselves from popular superstitions
and redefine Buddhism as a philosophical system, Buddhist scholars adopted the rationalization
and demythologization. This ideological clean-up, according to Faure, led to a drastic
reinterpretation of the Buddhist tradition. Buddhist notions of emptiness (nyat) and
karmic causality or the so-called codependent origination (prattya-samutpda) suddenly took
a scientific character. The Heart stra was even compared to Plancks constant. 1896
But wherever the Buddha spoke of this so-called dependent origination (prattyasamutpda)
it was referred to as illusory manifestations appearing to intellects and senses stricken with
ignorance. This dependent origination, as Dasgupta rightly claims, is not thus a real law, but
only an appearance due to ignorance (avidy). The doctrine of paiccasamuppda was offered
only to explain how sorrow came in and not with a view to the solving of a metaphysical
problem..1897
Doctrinal reinterpretation in the process of modernization and reform of Southeast Asian
Buddhist countries has followed three major lines: an emphasis on the ethical dimensions of the
tradition at the expense of the supernatural and mythical; a rejection of magical elements of
popular thought and practice as incompatible with the authentic tradition; and a rationalization
of Buddhist thought in terms of Western categories, along with an apologetic interest in
depicting Buddhism as scientific. Some apologists have claimed that all modern scientific
concepts preexisted in Buddhism. Others claim correlations between such Buddhist doctrines as
interdependent co-arising (skt., prattya-samutpda) and Einsteins relativity theory.

1898

Before looking for the some similarities of Buddist nothingness with process philosophy, we
must do better to place the Buddhist nothingness back into its true collective and sociological
context of world-renunciation. With the help of radical anthropological re-reading of Buddhist
nothingness and emptiness within the original context of world renunciation, the conceptual
confusion is to be reexamined. Under the title Critical Evaluation of Scientific Buddhism, King

1894
1895
1896
1897
1898

Conze, Buddhistisches Denken. Drei Phasen buddhistischer Philosophie in Indien, 82.

Ibid., 15, 18.
Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights. An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition, 99, 262.
Dasgupta, A History of Indian Philosophy, 139, 166.
Swearer, Buddism in Southeast Asia, 122.

398

has rightly pointed out some conceptual confusion in the theoretical constructions made by
scientific Buddhism:1899
Religious experience and scientific experiment move on different levels and are only most
superficially to be called equivalent. The attempt to equate the two leads only to confusion. This
conceptual confusion is obvious in some of the contemporary attempts to make Buddhism
scientific throughout. The Abhidhamma , or the third division of the Pali Canon is an extensive
and elaborate treatment of ethical-psychological-philosophical-cosmological questions that is
regarded by Theravadins as the summit of Buddhist intellectual attainment. The Abhidhammic
vocabulary is clearly pre-scientific in nature. Earth, air, fire, and water, even when
contemporarily explained as the principles of extension, mobility, heat, and cohesiveness, King
argues, take ones thought back to the days of the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers. Thus the
West may and should generously recognize the considerable intellectual effort that has gone
into Abhidhammic analysis, but according to King, it cannot be called scientific. Indeed its
quality as super-science indicates its non-scientific character. It may well be a charter for
religious experience but it is scarcely a scientific blueprint of the universe. With regard to the
vertical and static universe with its thirty-one plans in Buddhist cosmology, King argues that
this clearly comes from primitive folk-lore. It is on the level of the Babylonian versions of the
three-tiered universe of heavens above, the earth between, and the infernal regions below. It
may be that the thirty-one planes of existence, which are directly correlated with certain
meditational attainments will retain their status as meditational entities or experiential levels,
but they can no longer be thought of as physical levels beginning on the summit of Mount
Meru.1900
A basic doctrine of Buddhism, perhaps the basic one according to some Theravadins, is that
of Dependent Origination, or as we may call it, the causally-conditioned flux of events. We have
already noted how Buddhism rigorously extends this interpretation to absolutely all phenomena
save Nibbana itself. Gods, spirits, sentient beings in both their physical being and mental
powers, and the inorganic universe of matter about us, are all instances or products of this
process. Each is a confection or composite group of elements of greater or lesser extent and
duration but essentially of the same impermanent and insubstantial quality in the final analysis.
T. Stcherbatsky, in his volumes on Buddhist Logic, remarks somewhere how marvellously the
Buddhist theory of relations anticipated modern physics. In understanding the world in terms of
Dependent Origination and included absolutely all phenomena within its scope, as King claims,
we must note that it is governed by the law of kamma, the distinctive Hindu-Buddhist version of
causality. The whole process, from the individuals private thoughts up to and including the
dissolution and re-formation of worlds, is basically governed by ethical forces. But obviously
the kammic order is not a scientifically conceived causal order. Justice is not a scientific
1899
1900

King, A Thousand Lives Away. Buddhism in Contemporary Burma, 132-146.

Ibid., 132-6.

399

category; it involves a moral judgement and, in the case of kamma, a Power that rewards and
punishes in terms of physical-mental pleasures or pains added to moral deserts.

In this context,

King cites the comment made by Stephen Hawking: Modern Buddhism has sometimes tried to
recommend itself to the scientifically minded by pointing out that its view of the universe is one
of law, that it denies the personal God professed by most religions, but asserts that the universe
does impersonally(and therefore justly) what the personal gods were suppposed to do on
sporadic volition. It teaches that there are unchangeable principle such as Karma and the fourfold Truth upon which the human being can absolutely rely. This is the law, and the view is on
the whole well reasonsed; but here its affiliation with science comes to an end. The whole
genius of the laws of Nature as science finds them is that they are indifferent to the ethical
quality of what they regulate, whereas the law proclaimed by Buddhism is, after all, a moral
law.1901
This so-called schientific Buddhism could be said to be a mimetic product of Protestant
Buddhism as examples of the Westernization of Buddhism. The appareant repudiation of
metaphysical speculation in the Buddhas teaching, the Abhidharma theory of dharmas and
atomic particles (paramu) were seen as a prefiguring of modern atomic theory. Today,
comparisons are made between quantum mechanics and the new physics on the one hand with
the non-substantialism and non-dualism of Mahyna Buddhist thought. Increasingly, according
to King, one also finds a greening of Buddhism with an ecological rendering of the Buddhist
doctrine of the Buddhist doctrine of interdependent origination (prattyasamutpda) as a
realization of the interconnectedness of all things. Connections are also being made between
transpersonal and depth psychologies and Buddhist meditative traditions (particularly the
Abhidharma). However, as Bishop notes in his discussion of this cultural phenomenon: Only
occasionally do we read of religions different-but-equal claims to be of value in the modern
world. The Buddhism of faith, and especially that of the imagination, seems to have been
swamped in this continuing rush to give it a literal scientific and rational legitimation.1902

5.3.

Process Philosophy and Yogic Process of Buddhas

Thus, Buddhist, or more exactly world-renouncing concepts should not be confused with the
worldly physical concepts. In spite of superficial congruences between the process philosophy
of A. N. Whitehead and Buddhist thought, there are essential differences between two
diametrically opposed programs of endeavor. Process philosophy is intellectual, but Buddhist
philosophy is anti-intellectual. Conceptual thought of any kind is relegated by Buddhism to
1901

Stephen Hawking, Science and the Idea of God (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944), 16-17
(cited in King, A Thousand Lives Away. Buddhism in Contemporary Burma, 137-9).
1902
Peter Bishop, Dreams of Power. Tibetan Buddhism and the Western Imagination (London: Athlone Press, 1992),
83.

400

the level of "conventional truth", which is essentially delusive or false when seen from the
standpoint of "ultimate truth", namely world-renouncing truth. But Whitehead's program is
premised on the inherent validity of conceptual thought. 1903 In spite of its affinity to
Buddhism, Whitehead's view is profoundly Western. Unlike world-renouncing and antiintellectual Buddhism, Whitehead does not seem to deny the positive value of ordinary
experience. 1904
As King asserts, even if we consider a person only a set of kammically conditioned
factors, it is the purely private inside of these factors that is seen in (world-renouncing)
meditation. One is here dealing with attitudes, emotions, and all the intangibles of personal
adjustments; and most especially he is dealing with his materials in a context completely
meaningless to science the desire for personal salvation. Such Buddhist soteriological or
world-renouncing truths are not open to the ordinary type of reasoning, but are Higher Truths
discovered only by a (world-renouncing) Buddha or one possessing superior (supra-normal)
powers. Both of these factors, for King, put such truths far beyond the scientific realm into a
super-scientific area where scientific canons no longer apply. In this context, King correctly
highlights two kinds of truth in Buddhism: those rationally perceived truths that can be attained
by ordinary (scientific and philosophical) reason and another (world-renouncing) truths that can
only come by sacred world-renouncer. Here, as there, is then a barrier beyond which scientific
method cannot pass, and beyond which truths are super-scientifically, i.e. non-scientifically,
perceived and proven. Thus, in the final analysis, it seems that religious experience and
scientific experiment move on different levels and are only most superficially to be called
equivalent. In terms of basic attitudes, of the type of truth known, and of the materials involved
there is radical divergence. King maintains that the attempt to equate the two leads only to
confusion. This confusion is obvious in some of the contemporary attempts to make
Buddhism scientific throughout. King has critically examined the tendency to make Buddha into
a great scientist, who latently or potentially had an infinite scientific knowledge within him. His
intuitive insight into the insubstantiality and impermanence of all nature processes is thus taken
to indicate his complete mastery of the principles of modern physics. And sometimes he is
spoken of as having specified the actual physical dimensions of the atom. For King, the two
categories (world-renouncing and physical-scientific) should not be confused. The two
categories and concepts ( sacred and world-renouncing concepts of Buddhas/ daily and worldly
concepts of Buddhist householder ) should not be confused. The radiations of goodwill
throughout the universe produced by Buddhist meditation be confused with that energy and
radiation that natural science deals with. As King argues, one is a religious symbol and the other
a physical dimension. King notes that often the sometimes-errected barrier between the Higher
1903

Robert F. Olson, Whitehead, Mdhyamika, and the Praj pramit, inPhilosophy East and West 25, no. 4
(1975), 449.
1904
Charles Hartshorne, Whitehead's Differences from Buddhism, in Philosophy East and West 25, no. 4 (1975),
409.

401

Truths, super-normally perceived, and the ordinary truths, perceptible by science and
philosophy, is forgotten in the enthusiasm to conceive of Buddhism as fully scientific in
nature throughout its length and breadth. Clearly the line between the lower and the higher
truths, or the distinction between scientific fact and religious symbol (or subjective experience),
according to King, has been unheedingly crossed, to the detriment of both.1905
The conceptual confusion between scientific-physical fact and yogic-meditative states,
between ordinary, daily, worldly and normal categories of Buddhist householder and worldrenouncing, yogic, and sacred categories of Buddhist world-renouncer need to be critically
examined.
Attempts to demonstrate some kind of confluence of Western scientific thought with Eastern
wisdom and mysticism, for example The Tao of Physics by Fritjof Capra, were critically
reflected by Hardy. He rightly takes note of examples of pseudo-scientific correlationism
constructed which may present itself, for instance, under the title of structuralism or
psychoanalysis.1906
Masao Abe acknowledges that the Mahayana ideas of Emptiness and Suchness always
involve a risk to be taken negatively just because of their complete denial of duality. As soon as
these ideas are understood as an object or a goal, that is, objectively, rather than as a ground or
the root source of one's subjectivity (existentially), then they immediately turn into a mere
Emptiness and a very shallow and cheap Suchness. The history of Mahaayaana Buddhism, for
Abe, provides many such examples. They result in nihilism, pessimism, moral anarchy,
indifferent and uncritical acceptance or affirmation of social conditions. According to Abe,
Whitehead's idea of the dipolar nature of God with his principle of limitation may be
reinterpreted in the Mahaayaana context as a preventive clue against the recurrent
misunderstandings of the ideas of Emptiness and Suchness, the meanings of which tend to be
misinterpreted negatively. Abe asserts that the dynamic structure of the interaction among things
in the universe in Whitehead's philosophy should be introduced into Mahayana Buddhism.1907
Girardian victimary hypothesis as a unified theory of cultural institutions do seem relevant
and illuminating for the understanding this violent paradox consisting in immediate transition
from absolute Nothingenss or Greath Death into a very shallow and cheap Suchness or Great
Affirmation (for example totalitarian affirmation of the state). This Buddhist sacred dialectic
between absolute nothingness and absolute affirmation. could be best interpreted in terms of
violent paradox of differentiating and founding world-renunciation for the world order.

6.
1905
1906
1907

Psychology of World-Renouncer and Western Buddhism

King, A Thousand Lives Away. Buddhism in Contemporary Burma, 145-6.
Hardy, The Religious Culture of India. Power, Love and Wisdom, 381, 415-6.
Abe, Mahayana Buddhism and Whitehead-- A View by a Lay Student of Whitehead's Philosophy, 427-8.

402

6.1.

Nietzsche, Sloterdijk and Neo-Dionysian Philosophy

The ultimate postmodern irony is todays strange exchange between the West and the East.
When, at the level of economic infrastructure, Western technology and capitalism are
triumphing worldwide, at the level of ideological superstructure, the Judeo-Christian legacy is
threatened in the West itself by the onslaught of New Age Asiatic thought. Such Eastern
wisdom, from Western Buddhism to Eurotaoism, is establishing itself as the hegemonic
ideology of global capitalism.1908 According to iek, while Western Buddhism presents itself
as the remedy against the stress of capitalisms dynamicsby allowing us to uncouple and
retain some inner peaceit actually functions as the perfect ideological supplement to virtual
capitalism confronting us with the illusory nature of reality. It allows us to participate in it with
an inner distance and disinterestedness, keeping our fingers crossed, and our hands clean, as it
were. For iek, it is against such a temptation that we should remain faithful to the Christian
legacy and virtue of separation, of elevating some principles above others. The Western
Buddhist meditative stance is arguably the most efficient way for us to fully participate in the
capitalist economy while retaining the appearance of sanity. The way to cope with this dizzying
change, such Buddhist wisdom suggests, is to renounce any attempts to retain control over what
goes on, rejecting such efforts as expressions of the modern logic of domination. Instead, one
should let oneself go, drift along, while retaining an indifference and inner distance toward
the mad dance of the accelerated process. Such indifference and distance is based on the
Western Buddhisms perspective on the hitherto unknown dynamic of virtual capitalism, which
means that we are dealing with a mere theater of shadows, with no substantial existence and that
all of the upheaval is ultimately just a non-substantial proliferation of semblances.1909
Accepting uncritically this Western Buddhism, in his article Erwachen im Reich der
Eifersucht. Notiz zu Ren Girards anthropologischer Sendung written as a afterword to Girards
recent book, Sloterdijk argues for Buddhist enlightened ethic of disinterestedness (Ethik der
Desinteressierung) in this hotly undifferentiated realm of jealousy, which consists in Buddhist
description of attachment and its teaching on non-attachment by the sword of insight,. In this
context, Sloterdijk follows Friedrich Nietzsche who considered Buddhism as the noblest form
of affective hygiene for the individual and the group.1910 Despite an acknowledgement of
Girards groundbreaking insights into conditio mimetica of human beings in times of
globalization of jealousy, Sloterdijk opts for Nietzsches creative project to provide a
synthesis between the achievement of Abstinenzpsychologie of Buddhist type and neo-

1908

See Peter Sloterdijk, Eurotaoismus (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1989).

iek, Slavoj, Revenge of Global Finance, In These Times, May 21, 2005. Online
http://www.inthesetimes.com/ARTICLE/2122/
1910
Sloterdijk, Erwachen im Reich der Eifersucht. Notiz zu Ren Girards anthropologischer Sendung, 247-8.
1909

403

at

Dionysian doctrine of affirmation rather than for Girards ethical recommendations formulated,
in Slterdijks view, in a fashion of conservative reconsideration of the (Christian) roots.1911
Buddhism as the noblest form of affective hygiene should be understood as a sacrificial
effects or prices of world-renouncing reconciliatory victim who cleans everything while getting
itself dirty. The word katharsis refers primarily to the mysterious benefits that accrue to the
community upon the death of a human katharma or pharmakos. The process is generally seen as
a religious purification and takes the form of cleansing or draining away impurities. The
internal violence is drawn to the person of the surrogate victim. The mutations of meaning from
the human katharma to the medical katharsis are paralleled by those of the human pharmakos to
the medical pharmakon, which signifies at once poison and remedy.1912 The term katharma
was used as a variant of pharmakos to designate a sacrificial human victim.
In spite of the possible positive potential of Buddhist detachment and disinterestedness, the
originally sacrificial origins of Buddhist non-attachment, more exactly world-renouncers ethic
of detachment and disinterestedness should not be neglected. Buddhist ethic of detachment, as
noted earlier, was originally related to the world-renouncers dharma that is expected to govern
a world-renouncers life: detachment from and disgust toward (vairgya) all worldly things.
Detachment is the one necessary condition for world-renunciation. 1913 World-renouncers
yogic meditation on disinterestedness regarding the whole world has originally to do with
meditation on disgust (Ekelmeditationen).1914
The world-renouncer who has practised sla must train his mind first in particular ways, so
that it may be possible for him to acquire the chief concentration of meditation called jhna
(fixed and stready meditation). As a preparatory measure, firstly he has to train his mind
continually to view with disgust the appetitive desires for eating and drinking (hre
patikklasa) by emphasizing in the mind the various troubles that are associated in seeking
food and drink and their ultimate loathsome transformations as various nauseating bodily
elements. When a man continually habituates himself to emphasize the disgusting
associations of food and drink, he ceases to have any attachment to them and simply takes them
as an unavoidable evil, only awaiting the day when the final dissolution of all sorrows will come.
World-renouncer has to go to the cremation grounds and notice the diverse horrifying changes
of the human carcases and think how nauseating, loathsome, unsihgtly and impure they are, and
from this he will turn his mind to the living human bodies and convince himself that they being
in essence the same as the dead carcases are as loathsome as they. This is called
asubhakamahna or the endeavour to perceive the impurity of our bodies.1915
Thus the unveiled sacrificial mechanism behind the so-called affective hygiene should be
1911
1912
1913
1914
1915

Ibid., 251-2.
Girard, Violence and the Sacred, 287-8.
Olivelle, Sanysa Upaniads: Hindu Scriptures on Asceticism and Renunciation, 75.
Von Brck, Einfhrung in den Buddhismus, 83, n. 29.
Dasgupta, A History of Indian Philosophy, 102-3.

404

taken into account. Nietzsche used the history of Buddhism and the development of its basic
values as a foil to lay bare the bankruptcy of the Christian tradition. Nietzsche thought of
Buddhism essentially a form of mental hygiene, embodying a set of spiritual-psychological
techniques for cleansing the psyche of the madness consequent upon thralldom to desire.
Nietzsche, as Frazier asserts, presented this account of Buddhist psychology most often as a foil
against which he could expose and castigate the hidden psychology of Christianity. Since
Nietzsche believed that the Christian movement drew its principal motivating energy from the
rancor of the disinherited over their life's conditions, resentment was perceived as the
fundamental, psychological ground out of which sprang the Christian world view. As a
consequence, no matter what outward form Christian conduct or doctrine assumed (be it
compassion, mercy, or sympathy), in Nietzsche's estimate that manifested form only masked
aggression and passion, "the unrest of a religious fanatic."1916
A pacific spirit seemed to Nietzsche to dominate Buddhist morality issuing in a
generalized impetus to quietism, to avoidance of all affective states, and, eventually, to the
cessation of any action whatsoever. This quietism manifested itself most clearly in those
exhortations of the Buddha that man ought to cultivate states of thoughts and feelings which
Nietzsche characterized as operating narcotically to soothe an overstimulated and excessively
sensitized consciousness.1917
But Buddhist psychology represents the life-renouncing psychology of forest worldrenouncer in his homelessness. In his article The Psychology of the Ascetic, Masson attempts
to focus more closely on the psychological characteristics of world-renouncer. The negativistic
Buddhist psychology of world-renouncer should be read in the light of world-renouncers
refusal and denial. Thus we find the denial of pain in the notorious pacgni and other selftortures; the denial of physical needs in the refusal to take sufficient food; the denial of physical
illness (often by branding fevers trance states); the denial of the basic human needs of
companionship (in the living in isolation), affection, and family ties the most common Pal
formula associated with the Buddhist monk is agrasm anagriya pabbajati (from the life of
the home he wanders away into homlessness). (Forest) world-renouncers, according to Masson,
tend towards acts which would bring into doubt their very humanness; no doubt the wild
appearance of many ascetics today in India is the result of a deep need to appear inhuman.
Thus the ascetics belief in psychic immunity, for Masson, is purchased at a high price:

irreversible psychosis, self-destruction, or unbearable loneliness. 1918 Therefore so-called

Buddhist mental hygiene is purchased at a high price of homless and forest world-renouncers
self-sacrifice.
1916

96.

1917

F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967),
A. M. Frazier, A European Buddhism, Philosophy East & West Vol. 25, No.2 (April 1975), 145-160, 146, 150-

2.

1918

Masson, "The psychology of the ascetic", 620-5.

405

Max Weber also considered the biblical concern for the victim only as a distortion inspired
by psychosocial resentment. In his work on ancient Judaism, Max Weber, Girard contends,
perceives that the biblical texts usually side with the victims and it is a great singularity. This
singularity, however, he attributes to the historical misfortunes of the Jewish nation, in Girard
estimate, in a characterstic reconciliation of German imperial complacency with Nietzschen
and Marxist influences. As we become aware of the structuring force behind surrogate victim
mechanism we, Girard argues, must reexamine this implistic dismissal. From the perspective of
scapegoat mechanism finally revealed, even the more archaic biblical texts look like
reinterpretations of earlier myths powerful enough to undermine the mythical products of
victimage because they side with the scapegoat and turn back this demonic figure into an
innocent victim.1919
For Girard, there is something very deep in the reality of resentment, the modern passion
par excellence, as Stendhal and Tocqueville saw, as did Nietzsche in a way, even though he, in
Girards view, was aiming at the wrong target.1920 At the stage double mediation, where each
rival becomes a model-obstacle for the other, Girard says, the rivals increasingly resemble one
another; rivalry produces twins. One of them may win out over the other and regain his illusion
of autonomy; the other will then be humiliated to the point of seeing his adversary as sacred.
Girard asserts that this attraction-repulsion is at the base of all pathologies of resentment: my
worship of the model-obstacle and my metaphysical desire for his very being can lead me to
murder.1921
For Nietzsche, Christian values grew out of resentment and achieved spirit in the
metaphysical forms of revenge, but such psychologically negative groundings presented
themselves to the world in the guise of other virtues, for example, compassion, forgiveness,
mercy, neighborly love, etc. The Christian movement thrives on a kind of moral fanaticism,
claimed Nietzsche.1922 Nietzsche raised the spector of European culture passing into a nihilistic
phase, one characterized by a will to nothingness -- a will to the absolute relativity of all
values and, hence, to the frank realization that life was without any given meaning or goal. Such
a cultural destiny, Nietzsche called a new or "European" Buddhism. Europe, in his estimate, was
essentially without a civilization, largely due to the new barbarism engendered by Christian
values and manifested in such phenomena as the movements of mass politics, the prevailing tide
of socialist, humanitarian, and democratic concern in Europe, which were all grounded in an
underprivileged and gloomy view of life.1923 The very pace of European life, its intrinsic
restlessness and turbulence, constituted a further impediment to European man's capacity to

1919
1920
1921
1922
1923

Girard, "To Double Business Bound": Essays on Literature, Mimesis, and Anthropology, 226.
Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benot Chantre, 12.
Ibid., 31.
A. M. Frazier, A European Buddhism, Philosophy East & West Vol. 25, No.2 (April 1975) pp. 145-160, p. 153.
F. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. W. Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Press, 1966), 116.

406

cultivate the saintly repose and detachment of the classical Buddhist.

1924

Nietzsche sees the origin of Christianity in the idea of all the weak getting together against
the strong. But Nietzsche, in Girards view, is blind to the principle of the mob. Nietzsche sees
Dionysus as the opposite of the mob, the individual, whereas it is obvious from Euripides and
from everything we know, and the most elementary common sense, that Dionysus is the mob, is
that mania, that homicidal fury of the lynch mob that the Greek tragedy portrays. Nietzsche
discovered, Girard thinks, the difference between the archaic and the Christian when he said that
the latter are for the victims, but instead of finding that good in principle, he says it's bad. In
Nietzsche, there are unpublished passages that say outright that we need human sacrifice.1925
In aphorism 125 of The Gay Science, he believes that new gods will appear. Nietzsche sees
the mechanism of the founding murder. Nietzsche sees that there is something in Christianity
that is radically opposed to this hope for rebirth. Initially, Nietzsche was thinking about the
death of the Christian god, but along the way that death becomes a murder owing to the true,
hidden Passion of Christ that produces a veritable return of the repressed: God is dead. God
remains dead. And we have killed him. The first death of God does not lead to the restoration
of the sacred and ritual order, but to a decomposition of meaning so radical and irremediable
that an abyss opens beneath the feet of modern man. In the aphorism, according to Girard, we
have the impression that the abyss finally closes when the second announcement begins, this
time on the order of the superman and Zarathustra: What festivals of atonement, what sacred
games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we
ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it? The aphorism affirms the eternal
return, but it reveals the engine of that return: the collective murder of reconcilatory victims.
Owing to the very fact that it bases the eternal return on collective murder, its true foundation,
violence, which should remain hidden in order to be a foundation, is undermined by Christianity.
Nietzsches entire tragedy, for Girard, is to have seen but to have not wished to understand the
undermining performed by the Bible. Violence no longer has any meaning. Yet, Nietzsche tried
to reinvest it with meaning by betting on Dionysus.1926

6.2.

iek : New Age Pagan Universe and Western Buddhism

What ancient cultures, especially the Hindus and the pre-Socratics, call the eternal return,
for Girard, is a series of cycles of the scapegoat mechanism.1927 In this context, ieks
apocalyptic understanding of Christianity that are different from sacrificial dimension of
(Western) Buddhism seems to be more persuasive than Sloterdijks romantic attitude toward
1924
1925
1926
1927

A. M. Frazier, A European Buddhism, in Philosophy East & West Vol. 25, No.2 (April 1975), 145-160, 156.
Markus Mller, Interview with Ren Girard, Anthropoetics II, no. 1 (June 1996).
Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benot Chantre, 95-6.
Markus Mller, Interview with Ren Girard, Anthropoetics II, no. 1 (June 1996).

407

Buddhism. For iek, within the New Age pagan universe, the event of Christ is the ultimate
scandal. Christ brought the sword, not peace, in order to disturb the existing harmonious
unity. Thus, the Christian stance is radically different from the teachings of paganism. In clear
contrast to the pagan wisdom that the universe is the abyss of the primordial Ground in which
all false oppositesGood and Evil, appearance and reality, folly and wisdom, etc.coincide,
Christianity proclaims as the highest action precisely what paganism condemns as the source of
all evilthe gesture of separation, of drawing the line, of clinging to an element that disturbs
the balance of All. What this means is that the Buddhist all-encompassing Compassion has to
be opposed to the Christian intolerant, violent Love. The Buddhist stance is ultimately that of
indifference, of quenching all passions that strive to establish differences, while the Christian
love is a violent passion to introduce a difference, a gap in the order of being, to privilege
and elevate some object above others. 1928
Mythic illusion protected primitive and traditinal societies from any destabilizing knowledge.
For Girard, monotheism is the only way to rediscover a degree of stability in an equilibrium
that has become essentially unstable, a situation that is a result of the Christian Revelation.
Everything is adrift, extremely fragile. Asserting absolute similarity but also absolute
difference between the Christian and the archaic, Girard maintains that the Greek gods were
victims of bipolarity, of the duel, and that peace is never achieved. To bet on Dionysius,
according to Girard, is to believe in the fertility of violence while today we can see it as
essentially destructive.1929
In Buddhist, or originally world-renouncers stance of Dionysian undifferentiation, there is
the danger of amoralism. As Seik has rightly pointed out, Zens position that the Buddhist
world-renouncers satori can be reached only through a transcendence of dualistic notions of
good and evil is one that leaves no grounds for distinguishing the socially beneficial from the
socially harmful. Not only is it bereft of social significance, it is also incapable of providing any
sort of foundation for social development. Their Zen opponents countered by saying that
fixation on the dualistic dimension of good and evil merely promotes delusion and cuts off all
possibility of attaining the true peace of satori.1930
We have already seen this world-renouncers transcending, or more exactly transgressing of
differential notions of good and evil from the viewpoint of Girardian mechanism of surrogate
victim. Concerning the many rites of repentance found in Mahyna, it has been pointed out that
none includes a detailed confession of transgressions committed. There was in early Chan a
strong tendency to downplay the concrete, phenomenal transgressions and to promote a
superior form of formless repentance, namely, the understanding that all transgressions are

1928

iek, Slavoj, Revenge of Global Finance, In These

http://www.inthesetimes.com/ARTICLE/2122/
1929
Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benot Chantre, 126.
1930
Seik, Zen Buddhist Attitudes to War, 12.

408

Times,

May

21,

2005.

Online

at

fundamentally empty.1931 This, according to Faure, constitutes an important difference with

Christian confession as Foucault analyzes it, a technique aimed at exacerbating culpability.1932
As some japanese scholars of Critical Buddhism argu, Buddhism, particularly East Asian
Buddhism, and especially Japanese Zen, has become deficient in the are of ethics. In Japan
Buddhist insensitivity to the pflight of minorities and oppressed people, and other lapse of
strong ethical leadership, have raised questions in the mind of the Japanese public about the
ethical backbone and vision of some Buddhist sects.1933
The seemingly peaceful and harmonious universe of Buddhist polytheism could be
explained by the mimetic theory. The polytheistic plurality of numerous Buddhas and
Bodhisattvas who replace and represent the gods on earth should be taken into consideration.
The Buddha was one of an infinite series of buddhas, all of whom reached their exalted state
in the same manner, at exactly the same spot in India under one or another species of bodhi
tree.1934
Polytheism, for Girard, appears superficially more harmonious than monotheism because
ruptures in the harmony are generally resolved by triggering a single victim mechanism and the
emergence of a new god, who prevents the victim from appearing as a victim. The biblical
revelation refuses to deify victims. The Bible rejects the gods created by sacralized violence.
The deity is no longer victimized. The criticism of collective contagion is a criticism of the
mechanism producing the gods. The Bible, in revealing the single victim mechanism, enables
us to understand the type of world that polytheism projects. In the Bible, Girard asserts, the
confusion of the victimization process and the divine is dissolved and gives way to an
absolute separation of the two. The Jewish religion no longer turns victims into divinities or
divinity into a victim. Monotheism is both the cause and the consequences of this revolution.1935
The passive nihilism of classical Buddhism considered as the most extreme form of
nihilism was, in Nietzsche's eyes, the only possible remedy for European man.1936 This socalled passive nihilism of Buddhist world-renouncer could be explained in the light of
Girards mimetic hermeneutics concerning the generating mechanism of passive victims. We
can trace in Buddhist myths of world-renouncing tragic heroes (Buddhas and Bodhisattvas) a
system of representation of persecutions. This founding mechanism produces the sacred, the
founding ancestors and the divinities. The victim, in reality passive, becomes the only
effective and omnipotent cause in the face of a group that believes itself to be entirely passive.
1931

, Philip B. Yampolsky, The Platform Stra of the Sixth Patriarch (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967),
144.
1932
Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights. An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition, 258.
1933
Dan Lusthaus, Critical Buddhism and Returning to the Sources, in Jamie Hubbard and Paul Swanson, eds.,
Pruning the Bodhi Tree: The Storm over Critical Buddhism, 31.
1934
Donald S. Lopez, Jr. Ed, Buddhism in Practice. Princeton University Press, Princeton. 1995. Introduction, pp. 336, p. 17.
1935
Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 119-21.
1936
Frazier, A European Buddhism, 159.

409

The causality of the scapegoat is imposed with such force that even death cannot prevent it. In
order not to renounce the victims causality, he is brought back to life and immortalized,
temporarily, and what we call the transcendent and supernatural are invented for that purpose.
Girard argues that the scapegoat mechanism is the real origin of the various kinds of distortions
found in persecution. Through the surogate victim mechanism, the scapegoat no longer appears
to be merely a passive receptacle for evil forces but is rather the mirage of an omnipotent
manipulator shown by mythology to be sanctioned unanimously by society. The higher order of
mythology ends with the victim becoming sacred, thereby concealing from us, and in some
cases totally eliminating, the distortions of persecution.1937
As mentioned earlier, the themes of radical world-renouncers Courting Dishonor: Madness
and Acting like Animals should be read in the light of Girards understanding of reconcilatory
victim as a passive receptacle for evil forces. A renouncer is thus instructed not merely to
avoid praise and honor but to actively court dishonor and insults.1938 The future victim is
encouraged to commit some other transgression that would make him guilty in the eyes of the
community that would make him, in other words, someone capable of uniting the same crowd
in opposition to himself. The infraction the prisoner is invited to commit helps to mobilize the
crowd against him. The rite prescribes exactly what is required to arouse hostility towards the
victim at the precise instant demanded by the operation of the scapegoat mechanism.1939
The mythological and radical world-renouncer as a passive victim is instructed (in his
initiation) to actively court dishonor and insults through his transgressive acts. Therefore the
cynical, or more exactly transgressive acts of world-renouncer (Buddha, wild zen monks and so
on) should be understood in the light of sacrificial mechanism of founding victim. For Sloterdijk,
it is the Buddha who best represents his meditative interpretation of Cynicism, so much so
that the Buddha begins to replace Diogenes as the central model of Cynic consciousness.
Sloterdijk names many Cynics in his pantheon, from Diogenes to Heinrich Heine, and
Heidegger. Sloterdijk compares Diongenes to Zen masters, who share the Cynicscontempt for
followers and practice teaching through non teaching.1940He describes Adornos critique of
cognition as crypto-Buddhist1941
Sloterdijk suggests that ancient Cynicism is best understood as a form of Buddhism, by
which he means a practice aimed at dissolving dichotomies and achieving harmony with self
and others. According to Louisa Shea, in his Buddhist interpretation of Cynicism, Sloterdijk
simply posits the comparison between Cynicism and Buddhism and offers little explanation as

1937

Girard, The Scapegoat, 44-9.

Patrick Olivelle, Sanysa Upaniads. Hindu Scriptures on Asceticism and Renunciation , Translated with
Introduction and Note by Patrick Olivelle, New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992, p. 107-9.
1939
Girard, Job: The Victim of His People, 99.
1940
Peter Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, translation by Michael Eldred ; foreword by Andreas Huyssen
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988), 157.
1941
Sloterdijk, Critique of Cynical Reason, xxxiv.
1938

410

to which aspects of Buddhist meditation might be pertinent to his study. The result is a
frustrating confusion of terms, a pastiche of different traditions, and an uneasy feeling that
Sloterdijk is advocating a form of New Age nonsense Sloterdijks interpretation is
supported by the work of a minority of scholars who have aruged, against the grain, that Indian
thought directly influenced Cynic philosophy. The question of historical relations aside, even
scholars skeptical of direct influence insist on the striking similarities between Cynic
practices and certain Asian religious practices, such as those of the Pasupatas or the Zen monks
who frequently used perverse, irrational, and/or violent methods. A Zen master stroke
students with his staff to produce sudden insights and used shocking and/or enigmatic verbal
formulae as teaching devices. The Hindu Upanishadic Pasupatas members of an ascetic
Shivaite sect known for their habit of imitating dogs are thought to be related to the Cynics. The
pasupatas, like the Cynics, held an ascetic contempt for worldly goods and honors and actively
sought out contempt, offending others by their antisocial behavior and harsh condemnations and
seeking through the practice of dishonor to achieve an unconditioned freedom.1942
These radical world-renouncers seeking out social contempt through their cynical,
antisocial and transgressive behavior should be read in the light of surrogate victim mechanism:
if the transference that demonize the victim is powerful enough, then the reconciliation is so
sudden and complete that it appears to be miraculous and triggers a second transference
superimposed on the first one, the transference of deification.1943
Following Nietzsche, Sloterdijks philosophy is interested in questioning the fundamental
values of Western society capitalism, humanism, the Enlightenment legacy and in making
out of his inquiries a gay science, proposing alternatives to current social trends. By focusing
on cynicism as a central feature of the postmodern condition in the 1970s and 1980s and by
searching for strategies to resist it, Sloterdijk attempts to theorize the pervasive sense of political
disillusionment in the wake of the 1960s and the pained feeling of a lack of political and social
alternatives in Western societies today. For Sloterdijk, cynicism represents the only valid
response to the postwar crisis of meaning and its ensuing climate of disenchantment.1944
Many people, abandoning all philosophical rationality, for Faure, have been bent on drawing
attention to the irrationality, mystical character of certain forms of Buddhism and have been
mystified by it. This tendency explains the attraction exerted by Zen and Tibetan Buddhism in
the alternative culture of the 1960s and among its New Age Buddhist enthusiasts. Faure argues
that the Buddhism thus recreated in Western circles has frequently had very little to do with
reality.1945
1942

Louisa Shea, The Cynic Enlightenment: Diogenes in the Salon (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
2010), 156-9.
1943
Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 123.
1944
Louisa Shea, The Cynic Enlightenment: Diogenes in the Salon, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010, p. xi,
136.
1945
Faure, Double Exposure: Cutting Across Buddhist and Western Discourses, 67.

411

The cynical, or more exactly transgressive acts of radical world-renouncers (the Hindu
Upanishadic Pasupatas, wild zen monks, Buddhas and Bodhisattvas and so on) could be best
explained from the viewpoint of founding paradox of scapegoat mechanism. Mimetic theory on
the sacrificial mechanism of surrogate victim offers a fresh and clear path for us to understand
the curious them of divine madness and madness of the saints in Hinduism and Buddhism.
These radical and mythological world-renouncers could be thought to play the role of
reconcilatory victim. In all three primary mythological traditions, or in the three most significant
accents within Hindu mythology the aivite, Vaiavite, and kta the gods and goddess are
often called mad or are described or portrayed as acting as if mad. Perhaps not surprisingly
madness is also seen to be a typical characteristic of many Hindu saints. iva himself, the hero
of order, also betrays strains of uncontrolled wildness on many occasions, quite in keeping
with his overall nature. Generally, ivas mythological descritions convey the picture of an
untamed being who lives on the periphery of civilization. He is frequently said to mock
establishment values and institutions. iva, upholder of order, is also the bearer of a skull, a
night wanderer, the one clad in rags, the one covered with ashes, the ugly and fierce one, and he
who disguises himself as a lunatic.

1946

For Girard, as already argued, madness and the sacred are closely related. In the madman,
the two faces of divine violence are considered to be found. Consequently the madman were
treated simultaneously as an infection, a source of pollution, which must be kept at bay, and as a
possible source of blessings, a being to be venerated. Nietsche, Girard contends, never
uncovered the real significance of the Dionysiac mania.1947 Madness is a typical sign of the
Hindu saint and an an essential mark of the Hindu gods. Divine madness is not something
limited to saints of the bhakti traditions, although it seems most typical of bhakti saints. Among
such groups as the aiva Pupatas, the Tantric kaulcris, and the Buls of Bengal, madness,
or acting as if mad, plays an important part in spiritual exercise (sdhana) , or is clearly
understood to indicate a state of high spiritual achievement. These radical world-renouncers
seek an active encouragement of abuse and censure by the general populace. This is
accomplished by performing various strange, mad actions. The Pupata Stra says the adept
in this stage shoud wander like a preta (ghost); should smear his body with ashes and dirt like a
poor man or a lunatic; shoud not cut his hair, beard, or nails; shoud pretend to sleep while
awake; should tremble as if sick; shoud limp; should make amorous gestures at women; and
should speak nonsense (Pupata Stra 3. 11-17). Madness as a mark of, or a means to,
spiritual achievement is also seen among the kaulcri Tantrikas. In his quest for liberation the
Tantric sdhaka is said to pass through six stages. Finally, he reaches the ultimate stage, called
kaulcra, which is characterized by absolute freedom and total disregard for rules.The
1946

David Kinsley, Through the Looking Glass. Divine Madness in the Hindu Tradition, in History of Religions
13 (1973), 270-6.
1947
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 310.

412

kaulcri raoms about the the world sometimes as a man very civil and social and sometimes as
a person who does not care for social customs and behaves as an outsider or outcaste. In
Pupata sdhana the adept courts censure and abuse by acting like a madman. In his heroic
attempt to renounce the world the Puapata adept reinforces his physical renunciation of the
world by publicly behaving insanely and consequently heaping on himself the ridicule of the
world. Acting as if insane prepares the adept to completely renounces the world by turning the
world against him and engendering in his mind reciprocal feelings of disgust for that world
which loathes him.1948
By seeking out an active encouragement of abuse and censure by the general populace, these
transgressive world-renouncer as tragic heroes and passive victims seem to play the role of
founding victim. For Girard, the victim is made responsible for the transformation that moves
the community from mimetic violence to the order of ritual. In reality the victim is passive,
but because the collective transference discharges the community of all responsibility, it creates
the illusion of a supremely active and all-powerful victim and religious illusion of the
victim and the founding mechanism.1949 Scapegoating is not effective unless an element of
delusion enters into it. As transcendental signifier, the sacred victim, who is a sign of
contradiction (good and bad, desirable and taboo, mana of the structure, etc.), generates the
play of differences. The sacred victim is a sign without truth, without origin except chance
offered to active and passive interpretation, in which the community is born. This hypothesis is
as critical of Platonism as is Derrida, for it shows that the dream of philosophy is born of
oblivion, of obliterating the nightmare of victimage. 1950
Sloterdijk attempts to articulates the pervasive malaise and discontent in contemporary
culture. The transition from pre-modern to modern coincides with a shift from external to
internal meditation as the dominant form of mediation of desire. This results in increasing
rivalry and competition between human beings. The more society become egalitarian, the more
envy, vanity, greed and ambition become widespread. While traditional cultures considered
them to be harmful and attempted to restrain them, modernity began to see them as neutral or
even positive characteristics. The increasing competition and growing feelings of envy, vanity,
and greed result in a growing discontent in culture (an Unbehagen in der Kultur, to use the
title of a later work of Freud), a discontent which is the source of an ever increasing of
ressentiment in modern culture.1951
Sloterdijk, it seems to me, did not uncover the real meaning and hidden sacrificial
mechanism around the cynical or transgressive madness of radical world-renouncers.
According to the criticisms of iek, Sloterdijks work contains an anti-egalitarian and antiuniversalist discourse that is inherent to a Nietzschean concept of politics based on a hierarchy
1948

Kinsley, Through the Looking Glass. Divine Madness in the Hindu Tradition, 294-305.
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 52.
1950
McKenna, Violence and Difference. Girard, Derrida, and Deconstruction, 195-6.
1951
Guido Vannheeswijck, Voorbij het onbehagen: Ressentiment en christendom (Leuven: Davidsfonds, 2002), 89,
90, 91-2 and 95-96. See Frederiek Depoortere, Christ in Postmodern Philosophy. Gianni Vattimo, Ren Girard, and
Slavoj iek (London/New York: T & T Clark, 2008), 58-9.
1949

413

of affects instead of universal ideas. iek also criticizes deconstructionism. iek targets
Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler. He clearly resists New Age and so-called neo-paganism,
which he labels as spiritualism and neo-Jungian obscurantism. Against these currents of
thought iek takes on himself the defence of the subject as it has been shaped by modern
philosophy. His aim is said to reassert the Cartesian subject. iek rejects the postmodern
commonplace which states that the transcendental subject is over. iek relies on the full
acceptance of the notion of modern subjectivity elaborated by the great German Idealists from
Kant to Hegel. He also criticizes the postmodern understanding of religion that is adhered to by
many contemporary thinkers and which implies that religion can only survive by leaving behind
all ontological claims and converting into the respect and veneration of a kind of vacuous
Otherness la Levinas .1952
Against the spiritualizing and psychologizing interpretation of Buddhism by curators of the
Buddha, such as Aurel Stein, D.T. Suzuki, and Carl Jung and so on, the originally ritualsacrificial dimension of Buddhism should not be neglected. The psychologizing Jungian
interpretation of a mandala shoud be critically examined. When the art historian portrays the
mandala as an abstract symbol of an archetypal universe, he, Donald S. Lopez argues, ignores
the fact that a mandala is a particular palace of a particular deity who occupies the central throne,
a palace decorated in a particular way and inhabited by particular Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, gods,
goddess, and protectors, that there are many different mandalas, and that the initiate seeks to
memorize the palace in all of its aspects in order to become that particular deity. In tantric
initiations, the mandala, kept hidden during the early phases, is eventually revealed to the
initiate, who is then allowed to enter. It is this perfected abode, inhabited by Buddhas and
their consorts, Bodhisattvas, and protectors, that the initiate is then instructed to visualize, in
minute detail, in the practice of deity yoga (lhaI rnal byor). The ritual use of the mandala
seems to have been lost. Lopez is right in pointing out that like other elements of Tibetan art, the
mandala became prey to psychologization. This term was central to Carl Jung.). Tibetologists,
for Lopez, were not immune from the psychologizing trend. When the art historian protrays
the yab yum images as a symbol of the union of polarities, he ignores the fact that according
to certain systems of Tibetan tantric theory (including the conservative Geluk), the attainment
of buddhahood is impossible without at some point engaging in actual sexual union with an
actual (rather than visualized) partner, and that the biographies and autobiographies of Tibetan
lamas are replete with descriptions of their practice of yoga.1953

6.3.

Dionysius,the Crucified and Buddhas

iek has rightly pointed out the sacrificial dimension of harmonious unity and balance
of All in (New Age) pagan universe that is different from Christianitys scandalous and
1952

Ibid., 95-7.
Donald S. Lopez, Prisoners of Shangri-La. Tibetan Buddhism and the West (Chicago/London: The University of
Chicago Press, 1998), 146, 153-4.
1953

414

apocalyptic disturbing of the cosmic balance of All. Girard has apocalyptic idea about
modernity, the world of internal mediation and the increase in undifferentiation at the planetary
level. Christ exasperated mimetic rivalries. He agreed to be their victim in order to reveal
mimetic rivalries to the eyes of all. The linear time that Christ forced us to adopt makes the
eternal return of the gods impossible, and thus also any reconciliation on the head of innocent
victims. He came close to humans by throwing their violence into a panic, by showing it naked
to all.1954
Christ has replaced Dionysius, and thereby exposed himself to fiercer violence from the very
thing he has demystified. Nietzsche was totally involved in what was supposed to be the
creation of values, a re-invented aristocracy which was, for Girard, in reality the abyss of a
will to power. Girard understood that Nietzsches madness was related to Wagners
apotheosis. While Dostoevsky resisted, Nietzsche succumbed to the unbearable tension that he
wanted to maintain between Dionysius and the Crucified. In his paper Superman in the
Underground: Strategies of MadnessNietzsche, Wagner, and Dostoevsky, Girard provides a
psychoanalysis about Nietzsches madness and resentment.1955 According to Girard, whatever
its origins, Nietzsches madness certainly derives from the constant, increasingly accelerated
switching from the Crucified to Dionysius and from archaic religion to Christianity.
Nietzsche did not want to see that Christ has taken Dionysiuss place once and for all and that
Christ had both appropriated and transformed the Greek heritage. For Girard, Nietzsche thus
allows himself to be swallowed up in violences fight to the death with truth. In fact, he feels
that combat more strongly than anyone else.1956
The romantic understanding of Buddhism as a kind of noblest form of affective
hygiene1957 seems to neglect the sacrificial and violent roots of Buddhist Abstinenzpsychologie.
The mystified mechanism of surrogate victim around the world-renouncing psychology of the
Buddhist specialists of the sacred should be taken into consideration. Contemporary thinkers,
still under Nietzschean influence, for Girard, have the habit of seeing the myths as kindly texts,
sympathetic, cheerful, and lively. This view postulates the apparent absence of unjust
violence in the myths or the aesthetic transformation of violent deeds.1958 In this context, we
could find out some elements of the Nietschean version of philosophical neo-paganism1959 in
Sloterdijks support for Nietzsches creative project of synthesis between the Buddhist
Abstinenzpsychologie and neo-Dionysian doctrine of affirmation.1960
The neo-Dionysian in Western Buddhism and New Age pagan world-view could be
illuminated by the Girards theory on surrogate victim mechanism. The indefinite multiplication
of primitive and pagan gods, Girard argues, looks like an amiable fantasy to many in our time,
1954

Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benot Chantre, 103.

Ren Girard, Superman in the Underground: Strategies of MadnessNietzsche, Wagner, and Dostoevsky, MLN,
Vol. 91, No. 6, Comparative Literature (December, 1976), 11611185.
1956
Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benot Chantre, 96, 125.
1957
Sloterdijk, Erwachen im Reich der Eifersucht. Notiz zu Ren Girards anthropologischer Sendung, 247-8.
1958
Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 145.
1959
Ibid., 176.
1960
Sloterdijk, Erwachen im Reich der Eifersucht. Notiz zu Ren Girards anthropologischer Sendung, 251-2.
1955

415

something created for no serious reason playful or rather ludic. It is a playful fantasy of
which an overly serious monotheism, not playful at all, tries to deprive us. In reality, however,
the primitive and pagan gods are not playful. For Girard, they are mournful and destructive.
Before placing too much confidence in Nietzsche, Girard argues that our era should have
meditated on one of the most sharp and brilliant sayings of Heraclitus: Dionysos is the same
thing as Hades. Dionysos, in other words, is the same thing as hell, the same thing as death, the
same thing as the lynch mob. Dionysos is the destructiveness at the heart of violent
contagion.1961
For Girard, in the Dionysian passion and in the Passion of Jesus there is the same collective
violence. But the interpretation is different. The accounts of the Passion recount the same kind
of drama as the myths, but the meaning is different. While Dionysos approves and organizes
the lynching of the single victim, Jesus and the Gospels disapprove. In Girards view, it is not by
accident that the explicit discovery of what Dionysos and the Crucified have in common and
what separates them occurs so shortly before Nietzsches final breakdown. To elude his own
discovery and to defend mythological violence, Nietzsche, according to Girard, is obliged to
justify human sacrifice, and he doesnt hesitate to do so, resorting to horrifying arguments.1962

6.4.

Buddhas Dangerous Gaze

According to ieks analysis, many people refer to the well-known difference between the
way the Buddha is represented in paintings and statues, with his benevolently peaceful gaze,
and the way Christian saints are usually represented, with an intense, almost paranoiac,
ecstatically transfixed gaze. This Buddhas gaze is often evoked as a possible antidote to
the Western aggressive-paranoiac gaze, a gaze which aims at total control, and is always
alert, on the lookout for some lurking threat. In the Buddha, a benevolently withdrawn gaze
which simply lets things be, abandoning the urge to control them is said to be found.
Mentioning Gombrich, iek has rightly pointed out that although the message of Buddhism is
one of inner peace, an odd detail in the act of consecration of the Buddhas statues throws a
strange light on this peace. This act of consecration consists of painting the eyes of the Buddha.
While painting these eyes, the artist cannot look the statue in the face, but works with his back
to it, painting sideways or over his shoulder using a mirror, which catches the gaze of the image
he is bringing to life. Once he has finished his work, he now has a dangerous gaze himself,
and is led away blindfolded. The blindfold is removed only after his eyes can fall on something
that he then symbolically destroys.1963
But unlike Buddhist transgressive saints (Buddhas, Bodhisattvas, Siddhas and so on), in the
1961
1962
1963

Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 119-20.

Ibid., 172-4.
Slavoj iek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003),

20.

416

case of Christian saints, the true genesis of old sacred was failed. This failure of mythological
genesis, in the case of the Christian martyrs, for Girard, makes it possible for historians to
understand in a rational light for the first time and on a large scale the representations of
persecution and their corresponding acts of violence. We can trace in Buddhist myths around
sacred world-renouncer a system of representation of persecutions. Our inability to decode more
mystifying representations of persecution in myths, Girard correctly claims, is not merely the
result of the complexity of the undertaking or the extreme transfiguration of the data. For Girard,
scholars show an extraordinary reluctance to examine so-called ethnological societies as
ruthlessly as they do their own. Modern intellectuals are obsessed by scorn and feel
compelled to present vanished worlds in the most favorable light.1964
For Gombrich, this ceremony of consecrating a statue is so obviously motivated by fear
that it cannot be rationalized in terms of respect and affection for the memory of an
omnibenevolent Buddha, whether dead or alive. The very act of consecration indicates that the
statue is being brought to life, for it consists simply in painting in the eyes. The ceremony is
popularly called ntra pinkama. A pinkama (literally merit action) is any Buddhist ceremony;
ntra means eye; the whole therefore means eye ceremony. A more formal title is ntra
pratihpanaya utsavaya, festival of setting the eyes. The ceremony is regarded by its
performers as very dangerous and is surrounded with tabus. It is performed by the
craftsman who made the status, after several hours of ceremonies to ensure that no evil will
come to him. This evil, which is the object of all Sinhalese healing rituals, is imprecisely
conceptualized, but results from making mistakes in ritual, violating tabus, or otherwise
arousing the malevolent attention of a supernatural being, who usually conveys the evil by a
gaze (blma).1965 This Buddhist ritual of setting the eyes is still being practised in Korea.
World-renouncer, Buddha(s) yogic-meditative half open eyes under cranial protuberance on the
Buddha's skull seems to symbolize the sacrificial interiorization of (fire) sacrifice rather than
benevolently peaceful gaze. Buddhas with half-open eyes are burning (Eliade).
The superficially peaceful Buddhas gaze is related to the invisibility of sacrificial violence
hidden in the cranial protuberance on the Buddha's skull. For Girard, Veda myth about Purusha
is truly a founding myth, but violence is curiously absent from it. Purusha, the archetypical man
who is a little larger than the universe and is put to death by a crowd of sacrificers. It is from
this murder that all of reality emerges. It, Girard says, is probably so old that the violence has
faded out of the picture. This is the absolutely peaceful Vedic conception of things.1966 We have
to detect the hidden and mystified sacred violence behind seemingly peaceful image of Buddha.
Without seeing the concealed sacrificial violence, Suzuki writes:
Whenever I see a crucified figure of Christ, I cannot help thinking of the gap that lies deep
between Christianity and Buddhism. This gap is symbolic of the psychological division separating
1964

Girard, The Scapegoat, 63, 200.

Richard Gombrich, The Consecration of a Buddhist Image, in The Journal of Asian Studies, XXVI. I (1966),
24-5.
1966
Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benot Chantre, 135.
1965

417

the East from the West. Christ hangs helpless, full of sadness on the vertically erected cross. To
the Oriental mind, the sight is almost unbearable. The crucified Christ is a terrible sight and I
cannot help associating it with the sadistic impulse of a physically affected brain. Could not the
idea of oneness [with Christ] be realized in some other way, that is, more peacefully, more
rationally, more humanly, less militantly, and less violently? 1967

The real meaning and function of the Christs Passion, according to Girard, is subverting
sacrifice and barring it from working ever again by forcing the founding mechanism out into the
open. The Passion of Christ reproduces the mythological process with extreme exactitude in
order to reveal and completely subvert that process. The Epistle to the Hebrews, for Girard,
accomplishes something important by portraying the death of Christ as the perfect and definitive
sacrifice, which makes all other sacrifices outmoded and any further sacrificial undertaking
unacceptable. 1968 The linear time that Christ forced us to adopt, Girard says, makes the eternal
return of the gods impossible, and thus also any reconciliation on the head of innocent
victims.1969
Girards hermeneutics of suspicion helps us to understand the invisibility of founding
mechanism unveiled around Buddhas dangerous and world-renouncing gaze. In his book
Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World, Girard speaks of the invisibility of the
founding Murder (Chapter 4: Myth: The Invisibility of the Founding Murder). For Girard, the
mythic process is based on certain ignorance or even a persecutory unconscious that the
myths never identify since it possesses them. Collective murder, or the single victim mechanism,
has everything to do with the origin of the texts that do not represent it and cannot represent it
precisely because they are based on it, because the victim mechanism is their generating
principle. Only wherever it is not represented can mimetic mechanism of surrogate victim play
a generative role due to the very fact that it is not represented, that it misunderstands
itself .1970
The so-called affective hygiene and psychotherapeutic healing produced by Buddhist
meditation on voidness and ethic of non-attachment is the price of sacirificial mechanism
around self-emptying world-renouncer. Through self-immolation by fire, Bodhisattva
Kemadatta literally became a living lamp. This tale of Kemadattas offering is identified as
the recounting of a pivotal past life of kyamuni, the Supreme Physician. The flaming body
of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas is an outer indication of the achievement of deep meditative
trance. 1971 Nirvana means the extinction of (sacrficial) fire of world-renouncer, namely the
sacrificial death of Buddhist tragic heroes. Nirvana literally means extinction of a lamp or fire.
Just as the flame of a lamp struck by a gust of wind or lack of fuel disappears and cannot be
traced, so also does a Buddhist world-renouncer freed from name and form disappear.
iek speaks of opposition between Christianity and paganism presented in The Fragile
1967
1968
1969
1970
1971

D. T. Suzuki, Mysticism, Christian and Buddhist (New York: Harper and Row, 1957), 145, 150, 154.
Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 181, 200.
Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benot Chantre, 103.
Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, 126, 143-4.
Raoul Birnbaum, The Healing Buddha (Boulder: Shambhala, 1979), 32.

418

Absolute. He describes the pagan universe as a Divine hierarchical order of cosmic Principles.
Justice, in this regard, amounts to re-establishing the global equilibrium. The pagan world-view
understands society as a congruent edifice in which each member has its own place. The Indian
caste system is the ultimate example of this. Christianity, however, broke with this pagan
understanding of cosmos and society by stressing the immediate participation of each individual
to the universal dimension: regardless of the place an individual occupies in the Whole of the
social edifice, it has direct access to the Holy Spirit. Therefore, it is profoundly anti-Christian
to compare Christs death on the cross with the seasonal death and rebirth of many pagan gods.
Christs death is not at all of that kind, but is on the contrary a break with this (sacrificial) logic.
For iek,1972 reducing Christs death to the pagan scheme amounts therefore to canceling the
subversive core of Christianity.1973
ieks correct analyse of "perverse desubjectivization in (Zen) Buddhism could be
understood from the viewpoint of sacrificial mechanism of surrogate victim around Buddhist
world-renouncing values and logics of illusory emptiness and detachment. For iek, Buddhism
assumes the Void as the only true Good and teaches its practitioners to remain indifferent to
phenomenal reality, the "wheel of illusion." iek speaks of many examples of "perverse
desubjectivization in which the subject avoids its constitutive splitting by posting itself
directly as an instrument of the Other's Will. For instance, the Zen Buddhist, who, in an effort to
unite with the "primordial Void" renounces his Selfhood and ascribes agency to his weapon.1974
Buddhism has been mode trend of the intellectual elite of Europe. But, in spite of still
existing western romanticization of Buddhism, in Germany, this image of Buddhism that was
considered as the peaceful religions par excellence in almost mythical transfiguration has
been gradually but considerably weakened in recent years.

1975

Through the social

anthropological re-reading of Buddhist emptiness in terms of world-renouncers dharma, the

founding paradox of Buddhist world civilizations based on the world-renoucing values and
orientations was descriptively interpreted from the viewpoint of the paradox of differentiating
mechanism of reconciliatory victims. In spite of this strict sacrificial reading, the renunciatory
wisdom of Buddhism, mainly its devotional potentials is to be respected. We live now in
modern envy society. Without knowing the invisible and tragic mechanism of reconcilatory
victim behind Buddhist or world-renouncing dharma, ethic and logic of non-attachment,
Sloterdijk has valued the hygienical of Buddhist ethic of detachment in modern society of
envious resentment. 1976 We need non-sacrificial and creative renunciation. Girard is not
1972

Slavoj iek, The Fragile Absolute: or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting For? (New York: Verso,
2000), 118-9.
1973
See also Frederiek Depoortere, Christ in Postmodern Philosophy. Gianni Vattimo, Ren Girard, and Slavoj iek,
125-6.
1974
iek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, 23, 28, 29.
1975
Kollmar-Paulenz and Prohl, Einfhrung: Buddhismus und Gewalt, 143-7.
1976
Sloterdijk, Erwachen im Reich der Eifersucht. Notiz zu Ren Girards anthropologischer Sendung, 247-8.

419

unconscious of the sacrificial dimension that are hidden in the complete nirvanaesque
renunciation (ce renoncement nirvanesque total ).1977
This book attempts to read the invisible mechanism of surrogate victim hidden in this
Buddhist nirvanesque renunciation of world-renouncer. The psychotherapeutic effect is only
by-product of originally (world-renouncing) meditation. 1978 In terms of civilizational
founding paradox of the world-constructing world-renunciation, we can expect some positive,
devotional and peace-making capability from modern meditation-buddhism, without neglecting
the violent paradoxes of the sacred represented by the world-renouncing specialists of the
Dionysian festivals.
Girard considers that the crisis facing typically modern societies can be defined as the
elimination of differences that is a phenomenon typical of the undifferentiation now coursing
across the planet. We have definitely gone beyond external mediation and entered internal
mediation. This worldwide rise of negative undifferentiation and the trend towards
undifferentiation has been strengthened by the Wests technological and military means. Our
world, Girard says, is both the worst it has ever been, and the best. It is said that more victims
are killed, but we also have to admit that more are saved than ever before. Revelation has freed
possibilities, some of which are marvelous and others dreadful. The Scriptures thus announce a
historical necessity and this is very important.1979

VI.

A Dramatic Model for the Inter-religious Hermeneutics

1.

Mimesis, Complexity and Vanity of our Conflicts

The emerging multi-religious societies are characterized by a new complexity of inter-

religious encounter with all its constructive and destructive potentials. For the understanding of
the cultural complexities in the pluralistic societies and in the encounter of different religions,
the anthropologically based more complex hermeneutic for the inter-religious dialog is
demanding. Inspired by the mimetic theory as a comprehensive cultural theory, the dramatic
hermeneutics for the intercultural communication and for the sustainable and long-term conflictresolution and peace making will be proposed in this chapter. The social space along ethnocultural lines in polyethnic, multi-cultural and multi-religious societies over the last century are
characterized by a new intensity and complexity of inter-religious and intercultural encounter

1977
1978
1979

See Lefebure, Mimesis, Violence, and Socially Engaged Buddhism: Overture to a Dialogue, 122.
Dumoulin, stliche Meditation und christliche Mystik, 217.
Girard, Battling to the End: Conversations with Benot Chantre, 131.

420

with all its constructive and destructive potentials,1980 and presents enormous challenges to
their members both regarding the possible conflicts and the possible enrichment they offer.1981
In this postmodern age of liquid identities, undifferentiating experiences and dissolving
borders, entire societies undergo the experience of risky vulnerability and fragility. Tolerance,
respect, and freedom are fundamental social values for the peaceful coexistence, but they are
continuously threatened and vulnerable.1982 Human society turns out to be a fragile entity.1983
We live in a world in which reality is experienced in a more fluid, hybrid and undifferentiating
way. Crises, risks and uncertainties increase, but so do creative opportunities for intercultural
dialogue, learning and communication.

1.1.

A Dramatic Model for the Inter-religious Hermeneutics

New challenges demand new approaches. As Schwbel has rightly observed, a book like
The Myth of Christian Uniqueness emphasizes correctly the sense of urgency for the new
theological tasks, but it sometimes also reflects the tendency of reducing the complexity of these
tasks too quickly to programmatic proposals which restrict rather than open up creative
possibilities of theological reflection and inter-religious encounter.1984 In his view, a Christian
theology of religions and the hermeneutics for inter-religious dialogue based on the
disconcerting particularity of the self-disclosure of the Trinitarian God seems to be better able
to preserve the independence and distinctive particularity of the partners in dialogue.1985
According to him, difficulties can be traced to the failure to come to terms with the complex
relationship of particularity and universality in the religions, and especially in Christianity. The
exclusivist view can give strong expression to the particularity and distinctiveness of Christian
faith while neglecting the universality of the activity of the God. The pluralist approach,
contrary to its avowed intentions, seems to tend to build up a picture of the universal noumenal
focus of all religions transcending and neglecting the particular concrete religions, which allows
their distinctive particularity only a penultimate and preliminary status. This does mean that all
1980

Christoph Schwbel, Particularity, Universality, and the Religions. Toward a Christian Theology of Religions,
in Gavin DCosta, ed., Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered. The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology of Religions
(Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1990), 42.
1981
Ibid., 30.
1982
See Colloquium on Violence and Religion (COV&R) Conference 2007 at Amsterdam Free
University/Netherlands,
July
4

8.
"Vulnerability
and
Tolerance"
(http://www.bezinningscentrum.nl/links/special_links3/covr2007.shtml); Ulrich Winkler, Zentrum Theologie
Interkulturell und Studium der Religionen an der Universitt Salzburg theologische Konzeption, in Salzburger
Theologische Zeitschrift 11 (2007), 61.
1983
Raymund Schwager, Fragiles Gebilde Gesellschaft: Was sich von Ren Girard lernen lsst, in Herder
Korrespondenz 57/2 (2003), 1-5.
1984
Schwbel, Particularity, Universality, and the Religions. Toward a Christian Theology of Religions, 30-1.
1985
Ibid., 31, 43-4.

421

other religions lose their distinctive particularity and become examples of a general abstract
notion of religion or instantiations of a general religious metaphysics.1986
Pannenberg also emphasized the necessity of the more elaborate awareness of the interreligious intricacy. A theology of the world religions that wants to be true to the empirical
situation in the way the religious traditions confront each other must not evade or play down
the conflict of truth claims. There was, according to him, always competition and struggle
for superiority on the basis of different truth claims. John Hick has been criticized for playing
down the fact that different religions make conflicting truth claims. 1987 Questioning the
ideology of pluralism as the only possible and reasonable basis for dialogue and suggesting
dialog as only one possibility in the encounter of religions,1988 Moltmann rightly points out the
necessity of the plurality of modes of dialogue and many pluralistic ways of inter-religious
relations. 1989 In his view, the inter-religious dialog between the religious traditions with
truncated forms of religious pluralist identity, which were sanitized by subjectivist
tolerance for the religious marketplace of Western society, would be not the beginning but the
end of all true dialogue.1990
Therefore the more complex and dramatic hermeneutic for the inter-religious dialog is
required for the realistic understanding of the pluralistic complexities in the encounter of
different religions. 1991 The complex hermeneutics of cultural studies based on the more
Hobbsian anthropological realism can be viewed as an alternative to the Hicks soteriological
pluralism inspired by the Kantian epistemology. Ren Girard, one of the most important cultural
theorists of the twentieth century, provides extraordinarily innovative and wide-ranging insights,
cutting across central concerns in philosophy, psychoanalysis, literary studies, cultural studies,
religious studies, social-cultural anthropology, theology and sociology. Inspired by the insights
of Girard, a dramatic approach for the peace- and conflict-studies and for the intercultural
hermeneutics was developed.1992
1986

Ibid., 33.
Wolfhart Pannenberg, Religious Pluarlism and Conflicting Truth Claims. The Problem of a Theology of the
World Religions, in Gavin DCosta, ed., Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered. The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology of
Religions, 101-2.
1988
Jrgen Moltmann, Is Pluralistic Theology Useful for the Dialogue of World Religions ? , in Gavin DCosta,
ed., Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered. The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology of Religions, 149-53.
1989
Gavin DCosta, Preface, in Gavin DCosta, ed., Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered. The Myth of a Pluralistic
Theology of Religions, xix.
1990
Moltmann, Is Pluralistic Theology Useful for the Dialogue of World Religions ? , 152.
1991
Raymund Schwager and Jzef Niewiadomski, Religion erzeugt Gewalt - Einspruch! Innsbrucker
Forschungsprojekt 'Religion - Gewalt - Kommunikation - Weltordnung' (Beitrge zur mimetischen Theorie 15)
( Mnster: Thaur. 2003), 28.
1992
Jzef Niewiadomski, Raymund Schwager and Gerhard Larcher, Dramatisches Konzept fr die Begegnung von
Religionen, in R. Schwager, ed, Christus allein? Der Streit um die pluralistische Religionstheologie (= Quaestiones
Disputatae 160) (Freiburg: Herder, 1996). Inspired by the mimetic theory of R. Girard, the interdisciplinary and
internationally networked Research Platform World Order Religion Violence in Innsbruck seeks to improve the
understanding of the causes of violent conflict, the possibilities for a just world order and the conditions for peaceful
coexistence. See http://www.uibk.ac.at/plattform-wrg/index.html.de
1987

422

The dramatic perception of the interreligious und intercultural dynamics is gradually being
appreciated as a new productive approach for the intercultural and inter-religious
hermeneutics.1993 For example, under the influence of Girard, a reconciliation group in the
middle of the conflict in Northern Ireland has developed a view of the dynamics of the
intercultural conflict, conflict reason and conflict resolution. The deeply mimetic nature of the
conflicts in Ireland is clear. Each group imitates the other in frightening way. As the similarities
increase, the rivalries proliferate.1994 As Moltmann1995 has pointed out, religious wars within a
community have always been carried out with special severity and brutality in Christianity as
well as in Islam. The anthropological theory of Girard possesses the great analytical power for
the analysis of these strange mimetic phenomena.1996 This mimetic antagonism can be well
explained in the light of the mythological and anthropological theme of enemy twins or fraternal
enemies who illustrate the conflict between those who become undifferentiated.1997
The intriguing results generated by the use of Girards interpretative scheme when applied
to the analysis of intercultural relations pose interesting challenges to social theorists and
liberals. The rise of modern egalitarianism as a modern democratic dogma has caused the
omnipresence of intercultural mimesis and led to the double-bound mushrooming of envy,
resentment, and violence between cultural groups 1998 and to the envy society. The
accompanying rise of undifferentiating egalitarianism has tended to produce an intense degree
of tension, passion and envy at the intercultural interface. Girards Fundamental Anthropology
offers one of the most groundbreaking analyses of the dynamics of quasi-osmotic mimesis, envy
and resentment in modern times with its new intensity and complexity of cultural
interpenetration and mixing. This anthropological mechanism operates not only at the interindividual level, but also at the intercultural level: the greater the intercultural differences in
wealth and power, in the face of decreed rights to equality, the greater the envy and the
resentment as Tocqueville explained.1999
The more elaborate analysis of this complicated anthropological mechanism at the
1993

Nicht zuletzt deswegen gewinnen Vorschlge zu einem dramatischen Verstndnis interreligiser

Kommunikation zunehmend an Akzeptanz (Wrner 2003: 24). Concerning the dramatic model inspired by Girard,
see footnote 9.
1994
Duncan Morrow, Violence and the Sacred in Northern Ireland, in Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis,
and Culture 2 (1995), 156.
1995
Moltmann, Is Pluralistic Theology Useful for the Dialogue of World Religions ? , 150.
1996
Conflicts can be well understood in the light of the mimetic theory: welche hufig dem Brudermord als ihrem
Grundmodell analog sind (wie etwa im heutigen Nordirland).oder wurzelhaft verwandter Religionen (wie im so
genannten Nahen Osten), wo es ebenfalls nicht allein um Grund und Boden geht (Markus Wrner, Interreligise
Verstndigung als Gesprch?, in Michael Bongardt, Rainer Kampling and Markus Wrner, ed., Verstehen an der
Grenze. Beitrge zur Hermeneutik interkultureller und interreligiser Kommunikation (Mnster: Aschendorff, 2003),
20.
1997
Girard, The Scapegoat, 31.
1998
Paul Laurent and Gilles Paquet, Intercultural Relations: A Myrdal-Tocqueville-Girard Interpretative Scheme,
in International Political Science Review / Revue internationale de science politique 12 (1991), 176.
1999
Ibid.

423

intercultural and inter-religious dimension would be a suitable alternative to the more Kantian
religious pluralism and to the textual hermeneutics. As Surin2000 notes, the proponents of
religious pluralism seem to be in a sense totally on the side of the angels. The complexities
of centuries of dialogue, conflict and inter-religious rivalry 2001 should not be overlooked too
easily. It is not easy to deny that there is an element of (mimetic) rivalry in the inter-religious
dialog.2002
Surin2003 has rightly pointed out the simplicities of religious pluralisms that are not
adequate to the task of characterizing the complex modalities and patterns of speech typically
involved in conversations between persons who belong to different religious traditions. The
theory of language allows theologian of religions to acknowledge that such complex notions as
Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, and modernity are imbricated in radically different epistemes,
and are therefore registered in very diverse and even incommensurable ways in the apperceptive
backgrounds of those who engage in inter-religious dialogue. It needs to be noted that the
anthropological space of inter-religious dialogue is complex, vast and dynamic.2004
The discursive space of J. Hick and other pluralists turns out to be the space typical of an
educated liberal Westerner. 2005 In comparison with the Western world, the home of a decaying
yet persistent Christian church, there is, as Moltmann has rightly pointed out, in Asia and
Africa emerging a body of Christian believers who make no Constantinian claims and who
regard no such absolutism as a necessary consequence of Christian doctrines. The missionary
witness of such non-Western Christians in the midst of pluralist situations is, Moltmann2006 says,
a nonviolent mission of convincing people about their faith. The emergence of non-Western
Christianity needs to be taken into consideration in understanding the new complexity of interreligious studies.
The critical and careful re-examination of the fundamental anthropological dynamics in the
intercultural and inter-religious communication seems to provide a critical alternative to the
theologizing of soteriological pluralists. The mainly theologizing hermeneutics needs to be
deepened and widened by the cultural studies of new intercultural complexities. Different from
the theological hermeneutics of religious experience based on the Kantian epistemological
framework and categories, anthropological hermeneutics inspired by the keen insights of Girard
does not fail to notice the human all too human passions in the inter-religious dialog and
2000

Kenneth Surin, A Politics of Speech. Religious Pluralism in the Age of the McMonalds Hamburger, in
Gavin DCosta, ed., Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered. The Myth of a Pluralistic Theology of Religions, 206-7.
2001
Michael Barnes, Theology and the Dialog of Religions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 9.
2002
Hans Waldenfels, Begegnung der Religionen. Theologische Versuche I (Bonn: Norbert M. Borengsser. 1990),
26. See 7. Dialog und Konkurrenz (p. 26); 4. Begegnung und Konkurrenz der Religionen (pp. 71-74); b. Konkurrenz
im Bemhen um wechselseitige Inklusivitt (pp. 73-4).
2003
Surin, A Politics of Speech. Religious Pluralism in the Age of the McMonalds Hamburger, 206.
2004
Ibid.
2005
Ibid., 209.
2006
Moltmann, Is Pluralistic Theology Useful for the Dialogue of World Religions ? , 151.

424

intercultural communication.

1.2.

Mimetic Theory as a Theory of Conflict

Analyzing the episode in Don Quixote in which the barbers basin (an object of mimetic
rivalry) is transformed into Mambrinos helmet, Girard has pointed out the vanity of our
conflicts. 2007 The mimetic theory as a theory of conflict 2008 contribute to lessons about
conflict resolution drawn from anthropology, political science, history, psychotherapy or other
disciplines. By offering fundamental anthropological insight into the complex dynamics of
conflict, rivalry and violence, a girardian perspective on non-violent conflict resolution seeks to
promote healing, peace-making and reconciliation without scapegoating in theory and
practice.

2009

Girard's anthropological analysis of mimetic desire, metaphysical desire,

acquisitive mimesis and mimetic rivalry as a new way of looking at the deep-seated and human
all too human causes of human conflict and violence is both revealing and disturbing, but its
implications are enormous and groundbreaking.
An intercultural and inter-religious hermeneutic inspired by mimetic theory might be
described as an anthropological criticism. This anthropologically hermeneutics takes the
affective and the pathological moment of religious consciousness seriously.2010 Instead of an
abstract and over-textual analysis of religions, the anthropological deepening of hermeneutics is
necessary in order to tackle the complexities of cultural pluralism. According to Girard, it is not
differences that drive conflict but the quasi-osmotic operating mimetic desire to possess what
the other possesses. As Girard has pointed out, what is occurring today is, a mimetic rivalry on a
planetary scale.2011
Anthropological turn of inter-religious hermeneutics heightened by the socio-cultural
anthropological penetration paves new ways of sustainable conflict resolution and peace studies
at levels from the interpersonal to the global. For example, social anthropologist, Stanley
Tambiah is appreciated for his penetrating social-anthropological analysis of the contemporary
2007

Girard, Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World, 16.

See Palaver, Ren Girards mimetische Theorie. Im Kontext kulturtheoretischer und gesellschaftspolitischer
Fragen, chapter 3.1. Die mimetische Theorie als Konflikttheorie.
2009
For example, see Willard M. Swartley, ed, Violence Renounced: Ren Girard, Biblical Studies, and Peacemaking,
Studies in Peace and Scripture 4 (Telford, PA: Pandora Press, 2000).
2010
Influenced by the mimetic theory, Gerd Neuhaus has emphasized the necessity of the critical theory of religious
consciousness (Gerd Neuhaus, Kein Weltfrieden ohne christlichen Absolutheitsanspruch. Eine
religionstheologische Auseinandersetzung mit Hans Kngs Projekt Weltethos in Quaestiones disputatae 175
(Freiburg: Herder, 1999), 69. Concerning the affective and patholical, he writes: Freilich ist das sogenannte
religise Bewusstsein nie nur religise bestimmt, sondern es ist stets in der gleichen Weise pathologisch affiziert,
in der Kant auch den Akt des ich denke affektiven Determinanten ausgesetzt sah (72).
2011
"What Is Occurring Today Is a Mimetic Rivalry on a Planetary Scale." An Interview by Henri Tincq, LE
MONDE,
November
6,
2001.
Translated
for
COV&R
by
Jim
Williams.
See
http://www.uibk.ac.at/theol/cover/girard_le_monde_interview.html.
2008

425

central problems of ethnic violence manifested in South East Asia as well as for his original
studies on the dynamics of Buddhist society.2012 With the help of the theory of R. Girard, he has
deepened his socio-anthropological analysis of ethnic violence and conflict that had broken out
between the Tamils and the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka:
And this situation may also engender a process that Ren Girard has elaborated on in Violence and
the Sacred: the internal divisiveness and conflicts within a group or collectivity may drive its
members to seek out a scapegoat and sacrificially kill it to gain its own uncertain unity, making
of this cleansing a sacred act of generative unanimity and duty.2013

In his book Buddhism Betrayed? Religion, Politics and Violence in Sri Lanka (1992),
Tambiah tried to explain how adherents of a religion that espoused nonviolence could take part
in a political movement marked by violent action. He has written about the anthropology of
ethno-nationalism and the use of collective violence as a way of conducting politics. His socialcultural anthropological reading of the human all too human phenomena in ethnic conflict in
Sri Lanka can be regarded as an example of new approach to the intercultural hermeneutics and
peace studies.

2.

Mimesis, Orientalism and Postcolonial Cultural Studies

Hybridity, vulnerability, ambivalence and mimicry in post-colonial studies are new concepts

asking for the complex hermeneutics in the pluralistic world. Post-colonial studies, hybrid
identity construction, ethnology and cultural studies become a new theory-setting for the
intercultural hermeneutics. 2014 There are comparisons to be drawn between the girardian
appropriation mimesis and a theorist of post-colonialism, Homi Bhabhas notion of mimicry.2015
Mimesis is central to those who explore the contact zone between differences, hybridity,
everyday realities of cultural mixing and the ongoing process of intercultural borrowing at the
borders between different cultures. In order to comprehend the intercultural complexities in this
pluralistic globalized world, it would be helpful to draw attention to what Charles Hallisey has
called intercultural mimesis a phrase denoting the cultural interchange that occurs between the
native and the Orientalist in the construction of Western knowledge about the Orient.
According to Richard King, Orientalism can never be unilinear projection of the Western
2012

S J. Tambiah, Leveling Crowds: Ethnonationalist Conflicts and Collective Violence in South Asia (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1996).
2013
Ibid., 277.
2014
Winkler, Zentrum Theologie Interkulturell und Studium der Religionen an der Universitt Salzburg
theologische Konzeption, 62.
2015
Patrick Imbert, The Girardian Appropriation Mimesis, the Platonic Mimesis and Bhabhas Mimicry: The
passion for controlling representation in http://www.uibk.ac.at/theol/cover/events/innsbruck2003_Imbert_Paper.doc).

426

imagination and projections onto a colonized and passive Orient, since it always involves a
degree of intercultural mimesis. He has rightly emphasized the necessity of more complex
hermeneutics for the comprehension of the polyphonic trajectories that result from this
interactive process manifest the diverse ways in which Orientalist discourses develop.2016 The
religious pluralism seems to overlook the lacunae in this dynamic process of intercultural
mimesis, namely the failure of the West to recognize its own reflections in the mirror being
held out to it.2017
Based on a variety of and post-colonial and post-structuralist thinkers, such as Foucault,
Gadamer, Said, and Spivak, King rightly shows how religion needs to be re-described along the
lines of cultural studies. Philip Almonds pioneering study of the invention of Buddhism in the
nineteenth century2018 also provides a model for future endeavors not only in the field of
political hermeneutics or semiotics of the myths of power, and knowledge,2019 but also in the
field of new discourse on intercultural mimesis and Orientalism. Another book Curators of the
Buddha. The Study of Buddhism under Colonialism is an important work to draw buddhist
studies into the larger arena of post-colonial cultural studies and to trace the genealogies and the
logics of representation of orientalist buddhology.
The problematic of Orientalism and post-colonial cultural studies is increasingly discussed
in the intercultural and inter-religious hermeneutics.2020 As John Milbank rightly observes, the
other religions were taken to be species of the genus religion by Christian thinkers who
systematically subsumed alien cultural phenomena under categories which comprise western
notions of what constitutes religious thought and practice. These false categorizations connected
with the usual construal of religion as a genus embodying covert Christianizations have often
been (mimetically) accepted by Western-educated representatives of the other religions
themselves, who are (because of the intercultural mimesis) unable to resist the politically
imbued rhetorical force of Western discourse.2021
Supported by Nirad C. Chaudhuri and not falsely, Milbank take a few examples: John Hick
can speak of many roads to salvation, yet Eastern religions, for Milbank, do not seek
deliverance by divine grace from a sinful or merely natural condition. The Hindu practice of
bhakti is frequently represented as an instance of worship, when in fact it is mainly concerned
with a systematic appeasement of, and seeking of favors from, the various deities. The Eastern
2016

King, Orientalism and Religion. Postcolonial theory, India and the mystic East, 155-6.
Ibid., 156.
2018
Philip Almond, The British Discovery of Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
2019
Surin, A Politics of Speech. Religious Pluralism in the Age of the McMonalds Hamburger, 206.
2020
For example, ESITIS (European Society for Intercultural Theology and Interreligious Studies) Conference
Salzburg 2009, 15th - 18th April 2009 Interreligious Hermeneutics in pluralistic Europe, 6th Section: Is
interreligious hermeneutics possible in the light of postcolonial deconstruction of religion?
(http://www.sbg.ac.at/tkr/events/ESITIS-2009/ESITIS-2009-Salzburg-program.pdf).
2021
John Milbank, The End of Dialoge, in Gavin DCosta, ed., Christian Uniqueness Reconsidered. The Myth of a
Pluralistic Theology of Religions, 176.
2017

427

religions are often seen as highly mystical and spiritual in character, yet the practices, as
Milbank rightly points out, misallocated to these exclusively Christian categories are not
concerned with a quest for beatitude or unity with the godhead, but with attainment of worldly
power and liberation of/from the self.2022
For the dynamic understanding of the Dialectical Image: A Cross-Cultural Play of Mimesis
and Misrepresentation,2023 the more complex and dramatic hermeneutics for the critique of the
politics of representations as a whole in this mimetic process are required. In a discussion of
modern constructions of Zen Buddhism, Robert Sharf

2024

has written about an irony in the

intercultural dialog: The irony is, according to him, that the Zen that so captured the imagination
of the West was in fact a product of the New Buddhism of the Meiji. Moreover, those aspects of
Zen most attractive to the Occident the emphasis on spiritual experience were derived in
large part from Occidental sources. Like Narcissus, Western enthusiasts failed to recognize
their own reflection in the mirror being held out to them, remarks Sharf. This ironical
phenomenon might be well understood in light of the mimetic theory, particularly in the sense of
intercultural mimesis. Calling attention to the issue of radical decontextualization of the Zen
tradition, Sharf argued correctly that Asian apologists, convinced that Zen was making
significant inroads in the West, failed to recognize the degree to which Zen was therapeutized
by European and American enthusiasts and Western enthusiasts systematically failed to
recognize the nationalist ideology underlying modern Japanese constructions of Zen.2025
As Bernard Faure rightly observed,2026 the Western understanding of Zen is informed by the
entire orientalist tradition that gave rise to the various disciplines that define the space of Zen
studies in Western culture and in particular by the circumstances of the Western reception of
Buddhism. For this reason, the general questions raised by Said in his work, Orientalism, are
especially relevant for the field of Zen studies. Western perception of Zen is necessarily
mediated by Orientalist categories, which at work even in the nativist discourse of a Japanese
scholar like D. T. Suzuki.2027 In the light of the dramatic understanding of the latent operation
of (quasi-osmotic) mimesis at the intercultural level, the inverted Zen Orientalism can be
properly comprehended: Zen Orientalism represents, according to Faure, reverse, or inverted
Orientalism or secondary Orientalism which constitutes a subspecies of Japanese nativism
predicated on an inversion of Orientalist schemas.2028 Zen mysticism and Zen Orientalism
appears as an ideological instrument to promote a cultural image of Japan in the West und as an
essential component of the so-called cultural exceptionalism (Nihonjinron).2029 Some Western
2022
2023
2024
2025
2026
2027
2028
2029

Ibid.
Urban, Tantra. Sex, Secrecy, Politics, and Power in the Study of Religion, 14.
Sharf, The Zen of Japanese Nationalism, 39.
Ibid.
Faure, Chan Insights and Oversights. An Epistemological Critique of the Chan Tradition, 5.
Ibid., 267.
Ibid., 5-9.
Ibid., 86.

428

scholars romanticized Zen mysticism, which was subsequently re-exported to Japan2030 and was
mimetically appropriated.
In comparison to the tendency to isolate Asian religions into compartments of Orientalism
or spiritualism or mysticism, an increasingly self-conscious post-orientalist Buddhist studies
begins to understand Buddhism in the light of postcolonial cultural studies, cultural and social
anthropology, literary criticism and art history. In Germany, this shift of Asian studies to
cultural and social science studies is also taking place.2031 The auto-orientalism of East
copying, internalizing and appropriating the western Orientalism is critically examined.2032 This
new approach of post-orientalist Buddhist studies with its sensitivity for the dynamic
complexities in the intercultural mixing and borrowing would be recommendable for the
pluralistic theology of religions, for comparative religionists, and for those interested in
interfaith dialogues, who all too often uncritically accept Zen Orientalism.
The book Rude Awakenings. Zen, the Kyoto School, & the Question of Nationalism suggests
the necessity of the more complex and dramatic understanding of the intercultural
communication as follows:
Absent the entire problematic of the war years, the phrase Kyoto school soon became
synonymous with a wide-eyed, open-minded approach to religious philosophy that seemed to
answer the need for a serious encounter between East and West as few contemporary systems of
thought have For by and large, the comparative philosophers and theologians who were giving
these Japanese thinkers their warm welcome had simply overlooked the political implications of
their thoughts, especially during World War II. Today, the situation has clearly changed.2033

The Protestant Buddhism as a new kind of Buddhism also could be well explained from the
standpoint of the more complex and dramatic hermeneutics inspired by the mimetic theory of
Girard, particularly in terms of the intercultural mimesis. Protestant Buddhism in Theravda
Buddhism both originated as a protest (against Christianity) and itself reflects (mimetically)
Protestantism.2034 Sharf also analyzed the element of intercultural mimesis in the process of
refashioning of Buddhism in the image of Christianity: According to him, the Theravda
reforms, like the Buddhist reforms in Japan, must be considered in the context of the major
ideological changes precipitated by the forces of urbanization, modernization, and the spread of
Western style education, all of which contributed to the rise of Protestant Buddhism.2035 Like
2030

Yoko Arisaka, The Nishida Enigma: the Principles of the New World Order (1943), in Monumenta
Nipponica 51/1 (1996), 6.
2031
Kollmar-Paulenz and Prohl, Einfhrung: Buddhismus und Gewalt, 146.
2032
Christoph Kleine, ble Mnche oder wohlttige Bodhisattvas? ber Formen, Grnde und Begrndungen
organisierter Gewalt im japanischen Buddhismus, in Zeitschrift fr Religionswissenschaft 11 (2003), 241.
2033
Editors Introduction, in James W. Heisig and John C. Maraldo., ed, Rude Awakenings. Zen, the Kyoto School, &
the Question of Nationalism, vii ; See also Arisaka Arisaka, The Nishida Enigma: the Principles of the New World
Order (1943), 6.
2034
Richard F. Gombrich, Theravda Buddhism. A Social History from Ancient Benares to Modern Colombo ,174.
See Chapter Seven. Protestant Buddhism (172-197).
2035
Sharf, Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience, 251.

429

Meiji New Buddhism in Japan, Theravda Buddhism was refashioned in the image of postEnlightenment Christianity by emphasizing the values of individualism, which included the
affirmation of worldly achievement coupled with this-worldly asceticism and by repudiating the
supernatural or magical or ritual aspect of Buddhism.2036
The challenge of the intricacies of pluralistic complexity seems to demand the more
dramatic hermeneutics of the anthropological2037 rather than the purely textual hermeneutics.
Besides the civic virtues of pluralism and tolerance towards Others, the anthropological rereading of the human, all too human dimension of mimetic affections, passions, resentment and
envy in highly complex and pluralistic societies and also at the intercultural dimension is
required. The anthropological hermeneutics in an era of pluralism, complexity, and globalization
is increasingly accepted and applied in many cultural studies and religious studies. For example,
Slavoj iek describes the Terrorist Resentment: The problem is not cultural difference (their
effort to preserve their identity), but the opposite fact that the fundamentalists are already like us,
that, secretly, they have already internalized our standards and measure themselves by them.2038
It is not easy to deny that envy and resentment are a constitutive component of human (mimetic)
desire (also at the intercultural level).
This anthropologically-based complex hermeneutics for the intercultural communication
asks for a realistic understanding of the pluralistic complexities, but it can also promise the
sustainable and long-term conflict-resolution and peace-making and at last reveals the vanity of
our mimetic conflicts.

2036

Ibid., 252.
My overall impression of the ESITIS (European Society for Intercultural Theology and Interreligious Studies)
Conference Salzburg 2009 is that the more dramatic model for the intercultural and inter-religious dialogue is
increasingly accepted.
2038
Slavoj iek, Violence. Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador, 2008), 72-9, 73.
2037

430